Twitch Removes Support For Crypto Payments

Twitch, the streaming gaming platform, has reportedly dumped cryptocurrency as a payment method.

According to a report in CCN, citing a Reddit post, Twitch removed the option to pay through Bitpay during the past couple of weeks. The news outlet said it was able to confirm that Twitch offered bitcoin as a payment method for subscriptions.

Expedia, the online travel bookings platform, also stopped supporting crypto payments last year, and Fortnite removed the payment option from its gaming store.

The news comes as bitcoin payments declined 80 percent in 2018, which caused people to stop using it to purchase items, noted the report.

Twitch isn’t the only one that is skeptical when it comes to adopting bitcoin as a payment method. Earlier in March, Citigroup revealed it had been working a cryptocurrency since 2015, but had abandoned the initiative. The company came to the conclusion that while the technology had potential, there were more immediate ways to improve payments.

“Based on our learnings from that experiment, we actually decided to make meaningful improvements in the existing rails by leveraging the payments ecosystem, and within that ecosystem, we are considering the FinTechs or the regulators around the world as well, including SWIFT,” said Gulru Atak, who helmed the lab at the time. Citigroup is still working on projects in blockchain, but sees it more useful for trade finance.

Last year, Coinbase Chief Executive Brian Armstrong said that although real-world adoption is increasing, it will be a long time before cryptocurrency payments are adopted by the masses, and quite some time before consumers are paying for U.S. products with digital tokens. At the time, he said about 10 percent of cryptocurrencies are used for online purchases.