Cryptocurrency payment gateways are opening doors to real-world businesses with more secure crypto wallets, allowing users to safely spend their coins on goods and services that were previously hard to buy with crypto.
Today, enabling end users to buy global gift cards from a variety of retailers with crypto is increasingly easy, and using the right gift card API can even help to sidestep lengthy retailer sign-up processes, allowing crypto wallet users to easily buy gift cards without any registration.
Digital gift card APIs are thus increasingly seen as an easy, secure and convenient way to connect the crypto world to large chunks of the real-world economy, all through one endpoint.
The adoption of cryptocurrencies, both by businesses and consumers, has promoted the acceptance of retail purchases with digital coins, as well as new desires for better crypto wallet security and functionality.
Combined with a growing global demand for gift cards, today’s generation of crypto enthusiasts is discovering that buying gift cards with crypto is one of the easiest ways to make the hitherto elusive segway between digital and real-world economies.
Enrique Arrieta, the founder of Creit Tech, recognised the potential of the crypto for the gift card market and added a feature to their xBull crypto wallet that allows its users to easily buy gift cards.
While cryptocurrency now facilitates equitable financial access, especially compared to exclusionary legacy banking systems that could limit immigrants and restrict cross-border transactions, today’s crypto wallets for processing gift card payments are largely inefficient.
Enrique realized that existing market options were barely functional for advanced use, saying that current “wallet options in the industry’s ecosystem are inadequate to access technical features of the blockchain.”
He added that today there is clearly a need for more wallets that easily “connect crypto to products.”
Panama-based Creit Tech enables users to buy crypto with gift cards right from their Stellar Lumen wallets without compromising their privacy. The platform was also purposefully built to enable the purchase of a variety of gift cards without users having to register, making the process much more seamless than normal.
Reloadly supports Creit Tech to make the sale of gift cards with crypto as seamless as possible by providing a plug-and-play API that enables businesses to transfer gift cards worldwide from a large catalog of global retailers.
We set up a video call to discuss with Enrique Arrieta of Creit Tech just how their platform works, as well as how they have designed their platform to make the UX for buying crypto with gift cards better.
[Are you also interested in finding a way to quickly enable more seamless purchases of global gift cards? Contact the Reloadly team to learn more, or sign up to a no-contract account to access our gift card API.]
What inspired you to start a company offering cryptocurrency services, and what is unique about it?
Many banking systems are inefficient, and in some instances, inaccessible.
As a Venezuelan migrant, I have experienced first-hand the limitations of the banking system, and the potential of cryptocurrencies to empower people. For instance, the crypto space has protocols that reward people for their activities. Our farming feature is one such platform.
The xBull Wallet’s farming feature is a bot service that creates separated vaults for each user and automates the process of providing liquidity, as well as by compounding the rewards from protocols in the network. Compared to conventional pools of funds, our crypto-yield farm is more secure because it doesn’t have all the funds in one place, and it allows the user owner to manage the liquidity they provide from their wallets.
The privacy and transparency that cryptocurrency provides will snowball into other use cases, especially the use of crypto for the sale of products like gift cards.
The use of crypto for the sales of products sounds interesting. How did you venture into crypto for payments, and how do you intend to help customers buy gift cards with crypto?
As developers, we first started receiving cryptocurrencies as payments, then decided to create a wallet that empowered developers to do more.
We realized that existing wallets were limited. They did not provide developers with the range of functionalities a developer might need, and that restricted what developers could do.
So we created a wallet that allows us to do more, especially with regard to products. We established our platform to enable the purchase of gift cards via stellar lumen assets without compromising the user’s privacy. We aim to help more people buy global gift cards affordably, speedily and anonymously.
So, how were you able to put together a platform that would allow users to start spending tokens on real-world businesses through gift cards?
Selling gift cards can be a lengthy process.
For businesses, the registration and compliance process takes lots of time and effort, and Reloadly API helps us circumvent this time and effort to sell gift cards to users.
One of our unique features is enabling users to buy gift cards from their wallets without any registrations. They can simply execute purchases from their wallets and get them processed via Reloadly’s API. While we haven’t fully launched the platform, we are already receiving positive feedback from tests.
Excellent. So what was it that stuck out about the Reloadly API?
The response to our inquiry – compared to other platforms – was warm, enthusiastic and encouraging. Compared to other API platforms that seemingly had a disregard for small businesses, Reloadly cares about helping us grow from the second we began speaking with them.
