Samsung Pay will soon boast full-fledged support for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Bitcoin Cash payments, among others. This substantial addition to the mobile payments app is happening thanks to BitPay, an Atlanta-based startup claiming to be the largest provider of cryptocurrency payment services on the planet.
BitPay has been around since the early days of the blockchain craze and is generally perceived as one of the most stable pillars of this ever-volatile industry.
This is going to cost a lot of currency, right?
The company will equip Samsung Pay with crypto balances by the way of its BitPay Wallet app. As is usually the case with such ecosystem expansions, Samsung's partner is handling the new payment medium by converting it to a conventional prepaid card which you'll then be able to add to Samsung Pay.
The backend is in the figurative hands of Mastercard who'll allow both virtual and physical BitPay cards. Apart from the aforementioned Bitcoin duo and Ether, the service will also support payments with some of today's most popular stablecoins: USDC, BUSD, GUSD, and PAX.
Most importantly, the luxury of using your Galaxy device to pay for your groceries with cryptocurrency won't cost a fair bit, no pun intended. Because BitPay only charges a 1% processing fee to merchants, which is definitely on the more affordable end of the credit industry (it's not unusual for plastic payments to incur charges in excess of 3% of the total fee). Whether sellers will pass some, all, or none of that expense on to consumers will be left for them to decide, as was the case so far.
All things considered, this is definitely a huge leap for Samsung Pay compared to its earlier crypto experiments like the partnership with Stellar. BitPay plans to launch an Android app compatible with both Samsung Pay and Google Pay by the end of March – at least in the U.S.
