“Shift Debit Card” Will Aim To Allow You To Spend Cryptocurrency + Loyalty Points As Fiat

Shift is a debit card that allows users to pay in fiat currency (e.g United States Dollars or USD) using cryptocurrency (e.g Bitcoins). At the moment it’s only in the very early testing stages, with 100 cards currently being trialed. In the future Shift Payments (the company behind the Shift debit card) aims to allow users to spend their loyalty points as well.

If you’re interested in being notified of when the Beta opens, you can do so at the Shift Payments website which can be found by clicking here.

Our Verdict

It looks like their primary goal at the moment is to work out the cryptocurrency angle, which is probably a good thing considering that other companies have struggled to convert loyalty points to cash (e.g PointsPay). Points.com has had some success in this vertical, but unfortunately the value that you get from selling your points is so low that I don’t know anybody that actually bothers.

In terms of being able to spend your cryptocurrency with a debit card, I don’t think the Shift debit card will be a winner. This is basically built on the back of ripple which converts one cryptocurrency to another (XRC), I personally don’t see the attraction to this when your end goal in this instance is to convert cryptocurrency to USD – surely it would make more sense to do this directly.

It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out, I find cryptocurrencies to be an exciting place at the moment with a lot of innovation. On the flip side there is also no regulation in place at the moment, unfortunately this not only brings out innovation but also the snake oil salesman as well. If you’re a cryptocurrency expert and are interested in writing a primer, please contact us or submit a guest post directly.

Hat tip to TechCrunch via reddit.com/r/churning

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