Join Our Telegram channel to stay up to date on breaking news coverage
A partnership between Coinstar and Coinme is about to introduce a range of cryptocurrencies to offline investors, which they can easily purchase through their ATMs. However, this new product offering isn’t all rainbows and sunshine. Read more to find out.
Coinstar & Coinme
Investors and regular users were happy when they realized that they could simply walk into their regular Walmart stores and come out as Bitcoin holders. The machines that were known to transform spare change into usable currency, offered investors to purchase Bitcoin in 2019. And this partnership is an extension of the same enthusiasm.
Coinstar is a coin-cashing machine provider operating in thousands of places and 11 states in the US. They’re popularly known to provide ATMs that convert loose change into cash, among other things. Coinstar has more than 20,000 self-service machines across the world including Europe and Japan.
The Company inaugurated its cryptocurrency offerings in 2019 with Bitcoin. In a partnership with Coinme.
Coinme is a leading cryptocurrency cash exchange founded in 2014 and has been known to enable Coinstar with its crypto offerings. To provide a safe, simple and reliable way to buy, sell and manage cryptocurrencies. Eliminating the digital divide that restricted a certain section of the population from being a part of crypto.
All the crypto purchases land directly into Coinme’s wallet, eliminating the need to create and set up a wallet from another service provider. Recognising the fruitful partnership, the CEO of Coinme said in a statement, “Our partnership with Coinstar has allowed us to scale to 10,000 additional physical locations, providing instant cash onramps to crypto, which can be purchased and securely stored in the Coinme wallet or sent to nearly any wallet globally,”
Coinstar Welcomes Other Cryptocurrencies
Extending its offerings beyond Bitcoin, Coinstar, in a partnership with Coinme, has now integrated 6 other cryptocurrencies into its crypto offerings. These include Chainlink, Dogecoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Stellar and Polygon.
Bitcoin was the initial choice of offering for many reasons. For starters, the ATM catered to a user group most interested in retail investments. Further, these investors weren’t interested in complex processes to own a cryptocurrency, nor were they particularly welcoming of the volatility in the crypto market. Hence, Bitcoin had to be the only cryptocurrency that would incentivize these users into making their, for most users, first cryptocurrency purchases.
Apart from being the oldest cryptocurrency and having a reputation for being a reliable one, Bitcoin is recognized as a commodity in the US. And therefore, trading it isn’t an issue, and investors won’t be facing many problems from the regulators once they’ve made their purchase.
However, the opposite is true for other cryptocurrencies that Coinstar has onboarded. For the most part, these cryptocurrencies are recognized as securities. At least as per the SEC’s implication. There are yet to be defined regulations for crypto securities to be traded in the US, and this raises a few questions over why the companies decided to enter into a partnership now. As if this wasn’t an issue, they would have offered these cryptocurrencies much earlier. And if it is, they should wait for the regulatory frameworks to be definite and then take action.
Plus, it’s interesting to see why cryptocurrencies that have relatively complex operations are being made available. When the only reason users choose to invest in cryptocurrencies through an ATM is that the process is not technologically demanding.
LINK, for example, is known to provide decentralized oracles to DeFi. And as much as this aspect of it is exciting for those who’re curious, retail investors find it particularly difficult to wrap their heads around the whole technical aspect of a coin.
Owing to this, an inference can be made that these coins are being made available through ATMs only to increase the speculative participants and nothing more. As for those interested in technology, purchasing these currencies through an exchange suits them quite well.
In conclusion, it’s fair to say that this partnership will be lucrative to both the companies and the cryptocurrencies due to increased market participation.
In related news, crypto ATMs aren’t as well received in other countries as they are in the US. While there are compliance issues in some countries, few countries have simply banned crypto ATMs altogether, such as the UK.
Your capital is at risk.
How to Purchase Cryptocurrencies at a Coinstar ATM
Let’s take Bitcoin as the choice of cryptocurrency for this quick guide.
- Click “Buy Bitcoin” and enter your phone number right after you’ve accepted the transaction terms presented.
- Insert paper money, up to $2500, into the acceptor and receive a voucher with a redemption code on it.
- Visit the Coinme website, and enter the redemption code to claim your Bitcoin.
You will need to create an account if you don’t have one already. Once done, you’ll receive your Bitcoins in your Coinme wallet.
Read More
Join Our Telegram channel to stay up to date on breaking news coverage
