A1 Payment, which offers digital payment services in Austria, will accept cryptocurrency payments, A1 Telekom Austria Group announced in a press release.
The company made the change because “companies and consumers alike benefit from this modernization of payment transactions,” the release stated. The company will add that ability to the usual methods available via Maestro, credit cards or online payment platforms like Alipay.
Bitcoin, Ethereum and Dash are among the new crypto options for A1 Payment users, and they can be converted into euros in real time at the cash desk, according to the release, with no exchange rate or currency risk present.
Meanwhile, a recent bitcoin breakout came with a surge in on-chain exchange volume activity, according to data from Glassnode, noting a 50.74 percent total exchange inflow and a 58.19 percent exchange outflow total, Cointelegraph reported. There was also a 20.94 percent exchange withdrawal.
The on-chain activity could be more of an indication of the true patterns of bitcoin right now, unlike the regular trading volume, which is sometimes inflated artificially by the exchanges. The only number currently trending downward is exchange deposits, declining 1.29 percent, Cointelegraph reported.
The data also shows an increase in off-chain trading volume, with the BTC/USD pair seeing a 70 percent increase in its biggest bounce since April while DAI/USDT rose by over 700 percent.
In other news, across Italy, banks have been using Corda‘s blockchain tech to help speed up the double-checking of transaction logs, according to CoinDesk.
Eighty-five percent of the country’s banks, or 55 banks total, have made use of the solution to help switch up the process of interbank reconciliation.
According to Silvia Attanasio, head of innovation at the Italian Banking Association (Associazione Bancaria Italiana or ABI), the process has been in dire need of a reshaping, as it used to take around 30 to 50 days to get done, CoinDesk reported. She said the Corda process has shortened that down to just one day to complete a reconciliation.
The country expects to have between 70 and 100 banks using Corda by October, CoinDesk reported.
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