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April 2020 www.intellinews.com I Page 5
Making a contactless payment with GoCrypto at a Tus supermarket in Slovenia.
As with contactless card payments, mobile crypto payments are entirely contactless, reducing the risk of infection for people buying groceries and other essentials.
“Crypto wallets like [Eligma’s own] Elly or
the Bitcoin.com Wallet ... enable fast, direct transactions — all truly contactless, made with your phone. All of these advantages make them not only one of the simplest, but also one of the most recommended ways of payment at this moment,” said a March 20 statement from the company.
Four days earlier, CEO Dejan Roljic announced the company was keeping its services going uninterrupted, including its expansion into new markets. “We have found ourselves in
an unprecedented global situation of a scale that the world has never seen, but with our collaboration as a global community, with connected technology, we can brave it together,” Roljic wrote.
The world’s top crypto destination
Well before the current crisis erupted, Slovenia had already become the world’s top destination for cryptocurrency payments in bricks and mortar stores and other venues, with hundreds of retailers now accepting crypto payments. The country of just over 2mn people has
more retailers that accept bitcoin than the US (population 327mn), and there’s even a public monument to bitcoin in the industrial city of Kranj near the capital Ljubljana.
High levels of mobile and internet penetration, the highest incomes across the Central and Southeast Europe region, and general tech savviness all play a part, but to a large extent the integration of cryptocurrency payments into everyday life has been driven by Eligma.
The company’s mission is to bring cryptocurrencies from a niche product into everyday life. “The Eligma company is convinced that the advantages of the latest technologies including blockchain should become part of mainstream commerce, making it more efficient and user- friendly,” said Roljic back in September 2018.
In Slovenia, there was a high level of interest in crypto among the population, many of whom bought cryptocurrencies and wallets but didn’t have many opportunities to use them due to the lack of outlets accepting crypto.
“There are a lot of tech and blockchain companies here, but in our opinion, businesses do not adopt things just due to openness to new technologies. They do that because of increasing demand from the customers, and of course because of how practical and simple-to-use a solution is,” an Eligma spokesperson said in comments emailed to bne IntelliNews.
This was what Eligma hopes to achieve. According to the company: “GoCrypto enables instant crypto transactions and it easily integrates into the merchant’s existing software. The merchants do not have to know anything about crypto; they just select GoCrypto as a new payment method and receive settlement in their local currency,” the spokesperson said.
“The quick adoption of GoCrypto led to Slovenia becoming the world’s top country in the number of physical locations accepting crypto.”
Eligma worked with Slovenia’s largest shopping mall BTC City to turn it into the world’s
first “Bitcoin City”, with shops, cafes and entertainments all accepting payment in crypto.