Last week we announced Fold, our new mobile payment app for using bitcoin at stores where you shop at every day.
We launched Fold’s predecessor, Coin for Coffee, back in the spring as an experiment to see if our technology could power bitcoin payments at Starbucks. To our delight, people jumped at the opportunity to use their bitcoin to grab their morning coffee, and many users have made it part of their daily routine. We faced our share of challenges: broken barcodes, Starbucks and Coinbase service outages, and a rather colorful customer service incident that included a threat of bodily harm. In the end, we felt the experiment was a huge success. We’re excited to take lessons learned from Coin for Coffee and apply them in developing Fold.
Bitcoin is a Currency
Bitcoin has the promise to be so much more than old fashioned paper money, but it isn’t yet useful like the cash in your wallet. It’s difficult to use bitcoin to buy the important things for daily life, like cereal and socks and toilet paper.
We aren’t the first to feel this way. The emergence of bitcoin debit cards is the most obvious attempt of trying to solve this problem. We think the recent backlash around fees with Xapo’s new debit card helps to illustrate that this isn’t a preferred solution. We want to do better than rehash the problems with the current payment industry. We want a truly native bitcoin experience.
A Native Experience
With Fold, we want you to spend your bitcoin like cash. Using Fold is as easy as choosing how much to pay, loading that amount of bitcoin, and scanning your phone on the barcode scanner. Any change goes right back to your bitcoin wallet.
The Coin for Coffee web app works a lot like this already, but a mobile app will better integrate with your bitcoin wallet and provide a seamless day-to-day experience. We’ll release a beta of Fold for the iPhone this Fall and eventually an Android app too.
This is the most exciting time it has been to be involved in the bitcoin community. With this community’s support, we can build a truly awesome app that will allow bitcoin to live up to its potential. Get behind Fold and get involved by signing up at foldapp.com and following us @fold_app on Twitter. We want to hear from you, because you’re going to help make Fold great.
-Corbin
Co-founder, Card for Coin
Originally published at blog.cardforcoin.com.
