In recent months, the amount of institutional support the crypto asset has received has been substantial. After years of being shunned by the mainstream financial world, PayPal, CashApp, and Mastercard have enabled crypto transactions on their various platforms. And just a few weeks ago, Tesla and BlackRock formally entered the bitcoin market after buying large sums of it.
Since then, there has been a lot of speculation as to which company is next to embrace bitcoin, and apparently in every interview with business executives, this question is asked. The latest of these was with the CEO of Etsy, a popular online marketplace.
Etsy and Bitcoin: this marriage should not be done (for now)
The question of Etsy and bitcoin's potential in its future was raised during an interview with its CEO Josh Silverman on CNBC. When questioned on this topic, Silverman made it clear that there are no immediate plans made by his company to accept bitcoin as a form of payment.
The reason for all of this, Silverman continued, is that there aren't enough people who use bitcoin frequently at the moment and that even more people need to use and own bitcoin before Etsy takes it seriously. But that's not to say that Silverman himself is against bitcoin.
Conversely, Silverman confirmed that it has kept bitcoin as an investment for around seven years, as it sees it as an attractive form of investment. Despite this, he doesn't think bitcoin is ready to be used as a medium of exchange on Etsy.
If the use of bitcoin increases, then Etsy can consider it
More and more people are using cryptocurrency and more and more merchants are able to accept it, but Silverman's claim questions whether the asset is truly ready for large-scale use. One of the main reasons that prompted Tesla to invest $ 1,5 billion in bitcoin was to provide liquidity for when they start receiving bitcoin payments.
However, the situation is not the same in both companies. Tesla delivered 180.000 cars in the last quarter of 2021 while Etsy has nearly 40 million users worldwide. Should bitcoin become more widely used, we can expect more businesses at Etsy level to embrace the use of digital currency.
Etsy isn't the only company shunning bitcoin (for now), as Twitter's CFO said in a recent interview that there are no "current" plans to add bitcoin to the social media giant's balance sheet. However, this doesn't mean that it might not happen in the future.
In short, more and more people are interested in cryptocurrency and how they can integrate this resource into their companies. As part of a long-term investment (see Tesla shares) or as an accumulation plan for short-term earnings.
