Bitcoin has been created to enable fast, anonymous and most importantly secure payments to people from all over the world, without the need to rely on banks and third-party services or intermediaries. It’s therefore good to hear when it gets adapted and brought into wider and mainstream platforms.
Reddit is one of the bigger and very popular social platforms, where people can create their own subreddits, which are smaller personalized portals to connect people with similar interests, who then can share photos, videos and discuss their topics of interests together. The sole news about Reddit accepting Bitcoin as the official payment method on the platform isn’t necessarily anything new, as they used to offer this. However, due to most likely problems with transactions, which were managed by CoinBase Merchant Tool, they decided to suspend bitcoin as a payment option. There were allegedly bugs affecting many users. The spike in Bitcoin fees and transaction times were also most likely part of the problems the platform had to struggle with.
Cryptocurrencies adaptation
Recently, a tech news portal Cheddar.com, reported on their Twitter that “Reddit which hosts communities for every single cryptocurrency in the world, is hoping to bring back crypto payments to the platform”. It’s a great news for all of the cryptoenthusiasts, as Reddit is a well-known mainstream platform and such decision can make cryptocurrency payments more widely available and not only acknowledge by also used by many people familiar only with regular payment systems like regular bank wires or online systems like PayPal for example.
Apart from bringing back Bitcoin payments, Reddits wants to add also other popular cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Litecoin. The site’s chief technology officer, Chris Slowe, said: “we have been looking at other cryptocurrencies. As a matter of fact, that was part of the issue with the high fees on the bitcoin network. We are looking at ethereum and litecoin that are both provided by Coinbase”.
Coinbase used to offer their Merchant Tool to process cryptocurrency payments. They have recently replaced it with their new Coinbase Commerce, which allows merchants to accept multiple cryptocurrencies as the payment options. It has also many other new features compared with the older product and hopefully most of the previous problems and bugs were successfully solved and fixed.