Shopping online at Grass Hill Alpacas farm, you can buy a pair of socks in various sizes, colors, and styles. You can also choose how to pay: credit card, PayPal, or Bitcoin. Accepting the world’s leading cryptocurrency is now business as usual, says Grass Hill owner Jim Forster. “We do 5% to 10% of our sales in Bitcoin,” he says.
Buying socks, or anything, with
Bitcoin
has its drawbacks. The price could change in minutes due to Bitcoin’s volatility, and the transaction could trigger capital gains. But it’s one of many ways that crypto and e-commerce are tying the knot. And it’s an example of how the crypto economy is angling into the mainstream—signs of which are popping up everywhere and creating investment opportunities.
In the payments arena,
Visa
(ticker: V) and
Mastercard
(MA) are linking credit and debit cards to crypto brokerages, while
PayPal Holdings
(PYPL) and
Block
(SQ), formerly Square, weave crypto deeper into their apps. The mayors of Miami and New York are promoting their cities as crypto havens saying they’re taking some of their pay in Bitcoin and generating a little tax revenue from “CityCoins.”
JPMorgan Chase
(JPM), America’s largest bank, with $3.3 trillion in assets, recently opened a virtual lounge to promote its blockchain division, Onyx, in an online world called Decentraland.
The bedrock of this activity is blockchain technology—ledgers of transactions maintained by a decentralized computer network. Peering into the future—no one knows how far—is a next-generation internet, known as Web3. Blockchains, the thinking goes, could be the plumbing for a decentralized web, with cryptos as its currencies and digital assets.
The other buzzy term for Web3 is metaverse,…
