Square‘s Cash App has a new feature letting customers get bitcoin back with any transaction, CoinDesk reported.
Previously Cash App only allowed clients to get U.S. currency back with their transactions, according to the report. But bitcoin has been trending upward for the company and in general, with Square reporting $1.63 billion in bitcoin revenue from Cash App in its third quarter earnings.
The move is also possibly a way for Cash App to stay ahead of competitor PayPal, which has also recently entered the cryptocurrency arena. Other firms have made similar moves, with crypto lending firm BlockFi partnering with Visa to roll out a new bitcoin-backed credit card in 2021, CoinDesk reported.
In other news, Nigeria is now the No. 2 country in the world in terms of bitcoins traded, according to a report from Quartz.
The report found that Nigeria is the second-largest in terms of bitcoins traded next to the U.S. on leading peer-to-peer marketplace Paxful. Nigeria had traded 60,215 bitcoins, valued at $566 million. That number is higher than any other non-U.S. market, Quartz reported.
According to data from Coin Dance, per Quartz, bitcoin trades in Nigeria increased around 19 percent per year in volume since 2017. The highest volume of 20,504.50 was traded in 2020.
Meanwhile, Scotland’s University of Glasgow is using technology from Everledger, a blockchain provenance startup, to tackle “whisky fakes” and other fraud, CoinDesk reported.
A whisky fake refers to the belief by the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC) that around 40 percent of rare vintage whiskeys aren’t as old as they’re claiming, the report stated. SUERC, which is tasked with finding ways to authenticate whiskeys, will now use Everledger’s anti-tamper bottle tags and blockchain platform to track the whiskies.
The estimated value of the market for vintage single-malt scotch whiskies, according to the centre, was 57.7 million pounds ($78 million) as of 2018. That year, there were 21 bottles determined either to be fake or not distilled in the year advertised out of 55 bottles reviewed, CoinDesk reported.
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