The Shift card is slowly but surely getting a wider reach across the United States these days. Although there is still a long way to go, residents of four more states can now order this Bitcoin debit card, and spend cryptocurrency wherever plastic card payments are accepted.
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Shift Card Gains More Traction In The US
Offering a Bitcoin debit card to US customers is not an easy feat, and no one expected it to happen overnight. Shift is making a lot of headway in this regard, though, as they recently added another four states to their repertoire, giving residents a chance to get their hands on this Bitcoin debit card.
US citizens living in Montana, New Mexico, Alaska, and South Carolina can now order their very own Shift debit card in the coming days. Do keep in mind a Coinbase account is necessary to make use of this card’s full potential, as adding funds can only be done through a linked exchange account.
Now that Shift has discovered the path to offer these Bitcoin debit cards to US citizens; it remains to be seen if other issuers will follow the company’s lead. Before this offering came around, US citizens were not able to get a physical Bitcoin debit card, due to regulatory issues. At the same time, no international users can get their hands on the Shift debit card either, creating an interesting ecosystem, to say the least.
This is one of the reasons why a lot of Bitcoin enthusiasts do not like the concept of these debit cards, even though they make spending cryptocurrency far more convenient all over the world. In the end, a Bitcoin debit card is still linked to participating banks, and the same regulatory guidelines will remain in effect.
For example, a Bitcoin debit card provider able to serve their card to over 120 different countries is quite impressive. But if the US is not part of that list – or for Shift, no other country but the US is part of that list – the question becomes how viable this business model is. Especially when considering how nearly every Bitcoin debit card can be denominated in USD currency, yet only one of them is available to US customers.
Source: Reddit
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