BitAsset, Simplex Team Up to Smooth Mobile Payments Use in Buying Cryptocurrency

November 7, 2019         By: Steven Anderson

If you’ve ever had an interest in buying in on what may be the next big thing in mobile payments, cryptocurrency, then you’ve likely run into the headaches that are associated with such a concept. Trying to buy cryptocurrency can involve a gauntlet of identification types and worse, as Know Your Customer (KYC) and other laws kick in. Yet it may be a process about to get just a little easier, thanks to a report from BitAsset sent our way.

BitAsset is perhaps best known as a trading platform for a range of financial instruments, including the more popular cryptocurrency issues like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin, among others. Its connection with Simplex—which raised $7 million in a successful Series A funding round back in 2016—now allows users to more readily purchase cryptocurrency armed with nothing more than the standard credit card.

Since Simplex already has a range of connections in the field—including with Binance and Huobi, among others—that should not only improve access to cryptocurrency, but also bring in more users, which will help spawn the virtuous cycle of more users leading to more use cases, and more use cases bringing in more users.

Binance’s CEO Changpeng Zhao noted “Most of the world’s crypto money is still purchases in fiat, causing issues and a difficult experience for consumers trying to buy in and start trading. This is another key step in our platform growth as we continue to push forward the best user experience available on the market.”

Cryptocurrency still exists in something of a strange other-space right now, with potential users unwilling to jump in because there isn’t much of a use case for cryptocurrency yet. Worse, cryptocurrency still suffers from something of an image problem thanks to the sheer number of ransomware thugs who demanded Bitcoin to free up a system. A move like this can be helpful—just getting hands on cryptocurrency can be a bit of a challenge in some cases—but both sides of the equation are going to need to improve simultaneously to really draw interest.

Still, this is a start, and making cryptocurrency more accessible—both to buy and to sell—will help give this somewhat underpowered investment and mobile payments alternative some new life.