Today, Cointelegraph reports that a large enterprise called Just Eat has added Bitcoin payments to its French operations.
Active in 13 countries, the Just Eat network’s participating businesses will now use BitPay services to allow for Bitcoin payments for food. This means some 15,000 new French restaurants will accept BTC for payment on their menus.
Author Mohammad Musharraf sites a takeover by Takeaway.com, which has been doing Bitcoin payments since 2017.
“The price of Bitcoin will be calculated depending on its current price on Bitpay and the delivery platform will not charge any transaction fee for the cryptocurrency payments,” Musharraf writes. “If a user cancels an order paid for in Bitcoin, the platform will make a refund of the paid amount in euros in the user’s bank account rather than in BTC. The refund amount will not depend on the real-time price of Bitcoin, according to the website.”
In order to utilize the option, Musharraf reports, users need to create a digital wallet and then can set up Bitcoin operations.
This isn’t a one-off merchant adoption, of the kind that we’ve reported on in the past, looking toward 2019, then 2020, as the “year of Bitcoin.” Adding Bitcoin payment for 15,000 restaurants means a dramatic sea change in a country known for its cuisine.
For those who feel like the French have been trend-setters in the food business, this might signal further takeoff of Bitcoin payments across the European continent and beyond – but as we’ve seen so often, it’s not just a case of using Bitcoin for a payment medium. Also BTC-as-cash operations do increase institutional use, so many of the key movers for the BTC market are secondary adoptions: defi lending, staking, and other investment plays. Stay on top of both to know how people are using Bitcoin now, as opposed to how they have used it in the past.
