EGifter, a digital gift card provider, announced it has signed an agreement with CoinBase, a payments platform provider, to accept BitCoins for its gift cards.
From the press release:
eGifter, the social gifting company, has partnered with Coinbase as their Bitcoin payment provider. The partnership will enable users of the eGifter web and mobile apps to use Bitcoin to purchase eGift cards from eGifter’s growing list of more than 100 brands, including brands like GameStop, Home Depot, CVS and many other household names. Coinbase is a platform for buying and selling Bitcoin that was founded in June of 2012. Bitcoin is an alternative virtual, crypto-currency with over $1.3 billion in circulation according to Bitcoin.org and $4 million in transactions per day and growing. Coinbase has over 200,000 users producing over 138,000 transactions per month.
While eGifter is accepting the cards, that does not mean the individual merchants are accepting Bitcoins, since eGifter is acting as the intermediary. The mobile gift card application Gyft also accepts Bitcoins, but again, the application is accepting the alternative currency. The acceptance of Bitcoins by these intermediaries provides a way for Bitcoins to be used for real world goods and services. The potential drawback for Bitcoin boosters is that it means the merchants themselves can refer anyone who wants to pay in Bitcoin to the sites that sell their gift cards instead of trying to integrate the new currency into their point of sale systems.
Click here to read the press release.
