Greetings, I wonder if over time DT will create or bring autonomous cryptocurrency wallets on chips and be able to make payments with cryptocurrencies?
There are already options for the Apex line;
Well this is entirely up to forces outside of the wallet itself… so who knows if a point of sale crypto payment system will ever be mainstream… but it’s technically possible… someone just has to bring it to market in a successful way.
The key would be a solution that would simplify the experience for users and offer clear advantages over traditional systems. Do you have any vision of what such a successful market launch should look like?
A big challenge is the trained interaction traditional cards have. The method used by current digital point of sale payment systems have is a pull method. Basically you metaphorically open your entire wallet to the merchant and trust that they only pull what you intend to pay… and then trust they will never open your wallet again and pull money out without your consent, and then also protect your wallet’s secret numbers so nobody else can open your wallet and take whatever they want.
The entire system is antiquated and dumb… but this is how it works. The behavior then is that when you buy something you present your payment instrument (card or phone or whatever) and the vendor takes the money.
This is not how crypto works. Crypto is a push system. You’d never hand over your wallet private key to someone and trust they only take what’s owed and then destroy any record of your wallet private key. Because of this, the behavior of presenting a wallet on a chip at a point of sale doesn’t work. You’d need a phone or physical interface you can basically scan transaction details from the vendor, confirm the amount, then authorize the transfer. That requirement of needing some sort of device or screen that you trust to validate transaction details and push an authorized transfer to the blockchain… it’s just a challenge.
Not to mention, MasterCard and Visa and basically everyone in the payment game is actively working against crypto. They will pull emv certification for any payment terminals that integrate cryptocurrency at all… this means vendors and merchants would need two payment terminals… one for traditional cards and one for crypto. This is a huge hurdle for both merchants and customers. There have been a lot of different alternative payment systems that have explored breaking away from traditional card networks, and they all required separate terminals. The combination of customer confusion and additional hardware each merchant needs to purchase ultimately led to their demise, despite their promising features and lower costs per transaction.
As always, the challenges are hardly technical though… they’re almost always people and policy and underhanded business practices that seek to undermine dislodging or displacing the current reigning market winners.
You are absolutely right: the current card-based system relies too heavily on a “pull” model that is inherently flawed, especially in terms of security and user control. The “push”-based crypto payments model is inherently more secure, as it puts the payer in control of their funds. However, this paradigm shift presents significant challenges, especially in user behavior, hardware integration, and political and corporate resistance.
You also have the option of Cold Storage
One other option (there are probably more)
is a Crypto.com credit card, which is a normal credit card, attached to your crypto account.
You can top it up with any Crypto in your wallet, and you also have the ability to top up with another credit card.
How does this help?
Well the Chip in the card is a CoM chip so it can be converted
Just be aware… cards like this are a direct attempt at subverting the entire premise of cryptocurrency’s approach to direct payments. On one hand, MasterCard and Visa etc. work hard to thwart cryptocurrency’s ingress into their monopolistic market space by threatening banks, point of sale developers, payment terminal companies, and even card manufacturers themselves (they’ve made it policy to refuse to allow chips in payment cards to carry any crypto applications alongside traditional payment applications).
Meanwhile they all went in big time to invest in and prop up crypto.com because their “crypto” card doesn’t let you pay in crypto… when you make a purchase with the card, it goes through the regular payment network channels (a pull system), with all the normal fraud risk and merchant processing fees, just like any other card, and then they simply sell some crypto from your wallet to cover the USD or whatever currency the transaction was in. On one hand it lets people feel good about crypto but it ensures they are at the center of all transactions, they get to reap hefty fees for each transaction, and ultimately this approach so heavily subverts the premise and power of crypto for one purpose - to ensure it will never endanger their business model or unseat them at the absolute center of electronic payments.