One year after Pick n Pay announced it will be accepting crypto payments within its retail stores, it has now been revealed that sales using crypto have now hit one million Rand (~$55,000) a month.
Most of the crypto payments are for:
- Groceries
- Airtime
- Data
- Municipal bills
Pick n Pay has over 700 stores, and about 900 outlets, across South Africa with over 9 billion Rand (~$500 million) in monthly turnover making the one million Rand look like small change.
However, when you consider that Pick n Pay payments were only 25,000 Rand a month when they launched crypto payments, the growth has been exponential and is expected to continue as more people leverage crypto for payments.
Some common ways used for making purchases using Bitcoin at Pick n Pay stores include:
- Binance wallet
- Money Badger crypto wallet
- VALR wallet
- LUNO wallet
According to Money Badger, the growth is taking place as a result of partnerships with big wallet providers enabling them to tap into the existing customer bases while making it easy for people to use crypto to make payments. In the coming years, the focus will be in adding merchant networks in order to drive the next phase of growth.
Commenting on the success of this partnership, Hannes Wessels, the Country Head of South Africa for Binance, said:
“We’ve had great success with our Binance Pay product here, working with the guys at Cryptoconvert/ Moneybadger. with Binance Pay, we dont use Lightning, but rather an instant crypto to fiat conversion.
In the app, you set up your liquidation preference, stating which tokens/ coins you want to see liquidated first when you use Binance Pay.”
Interestingly, the majority of the spend is in Bitcoin despite the expectation that stablecoins would be the most popular.
The average transaction is about 1,000 Rand (~$55) with most of these transactions being used for paying bills like water and electricity.
Another trend that has been noticed is the urge to spend using crypto when the markets are on the uptrend and reluctance to spend when the markets are down.
In order to make the experience seamless, wallet providers have focussed on user interfaces and the retail systems to ensure it is as easy as possible for everyone involved. There have been experiences of even kids paying via crypto demonstrating an enabling user experience.
With South Africa requiring crypto service providers to be licensed, retail merchants now have a list of reliable crypto payments service providers to leverage if looking to accept crypto payments.
🇿🇦LIST | Here are the 75 Crypto Firms Granted CASP Licenses by South African Financial Watchdog, FSCA
“374 licence applications have been received to date. The FSCA will continue to provide regular updates as these applications are processed and approved.” – FSCA… pic.twitter.com/GnStpzogj7
— BitKE (@BitcoinKE) April 23, 2024
Boutique stores in Jo’burg and Cape Town are also reportedly increasingly starting to accept crypto, particularly for international tourists who fear theft or fraud from using payment cards.
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