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Bitcoin Suisse and Worldline ink partnership for wider crypto use

Cryptocurrency financial services firm, Bitcoin Suisse, is teaming up with payments company, Wordline, to facilitate crypto use at the point of sale.

The two firms have signed a letter of intent for a partnership with further details to be presented at the upcoming Swiss Payments Forum in Zurich next week.

The cooperation is aimed at leveraging Worldline's payment service network and Bitcoin Suisse's cryptopcurrency payment capabilities to spread the use of crypto as a means of transacting in Switzerland.

A joint statement from the two firms declares that the service will be "intuitive and straightforward" on both sides of a transaction, with payouts made in Swiss francs or Euros, which may ease merchant fears about crypto's volatility.

Bitcoin Suisse's CEO, Dr Arthur Vayloyan, has applauded Worldline for its "pioneering spirit in taking this monumental step" and deems the partnership "an incredible step forward on the journey to bring crypto payments into broader adoption".

"Through the cooperation with Bitcoin Suisse, merchants can benefit from an entirely new offering without taking any conversion risk," Worldine CEO, Marc Schluep, adds.

Should the launch in Switzerland prove successful, Wordline intends to roll out its crypto payment service to the rest of Europe.

The alpine nation has established itself as a crypto centre in the last few years, with more than 800 companies invested in cryptocurrency and blockchain-related projects.

The town of Zug in central Switzerland has become known as Crypto Valley thanks to the prominence of companies engaged in cryptocurrency. In 2016, the town began accepting Bitcoin for public services.

Switzerland is also the home of the Libra Association, the company behind Facebook's project to launch its own digital coin.

Jamie Crawley, Reporter, Finextra

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Editorial | what does this mean?

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community.

Comments: (2)

A Finextra member 08 November, 2019, 11:29

1 like I fund it irresponsible when journalists show pictures of a bitcoin or ethereum represented as a physical coin. My father-in-law (a medical doctor) was surprised when I told him they were not physical coins as a result of all these misleading graphics. His follow-up question was “what are they made of then?” There is going to be a big backlash from all this stuff being mis-sold into retail channels and journalists have played their part.

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Jeremy Light - pingNpay - London 10 November, 2019, 11:49

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I concur with Barrie's view, but the metaphor is fundamentally incorrect as well.

There is no such thing as a bitcoin or an ethereum etc, there is no digital item you can find or identify, for example a unique character string to represent individual bitcoins or ethereum.

Instead, on these blockchains, there are transactions associated (digitally signed) with private keys, and each private key has a net balance, a number, of the buy and sell transactions for that private key, which is typically calculated by a wallet but not stored as a balance (however, there are blockchains such as the XRP ledger which do use the concept of an account and maintain a balance for each private key on a ledger account, which has processing advantages, but there is still no concept of a uniquely identifiable XRP).

This balance is just a number, which is given a unit name such as bitcoin, depending on the blockchain. For example, there are 18,038,238 bitcoins as of 9 Nov 2019, which means the sum of the balance on all the private keys used on the bitcoin blockchain sums to 18,038,238. It is incorrect to believe there are 18,038,238 uniquely identifiable bitcoins.

Many journalists fail to understand this concept, especially when talking about tokenisation. Digital assets such as bitcoin and ethereum are often described as tokens, but the token is the name of the units of the balances associated with each private key, there are no uniquely identifiable BTC or ETH tokens.