Crypto investors in the city of Dublin can now spend their crypto at the latest cafe in town. The trendy café accepts litecoin and ethereum.
Customers can pay with digital currency straight from their wallets using their Smartphones, as per the Irish Times.
Crypto Investor
The owner of the café, Nash Basel, is a cryptocurrency enthusiast and investor who started investing six months ago but had studied the markets very well to know the best time to save profits.
He was smart enough to have sold out in early January before the onset of the crypto bloodbath that saw the price of bitcoin fall from over $19,000 to just above the $6k price region.
Basel hinted that he established the café with the gains he made from his crypto holdings just before the bearish run began. “I got a bit lucky,” he recalls.
The crypto café on Aungier Street makes it his second venture in the hospitality industry. He also has a restaurant on Dublin’s Camden Street.
Initially, Mr. Basel thought of opening a regular café that accept only cash payments, but then he decided to give his new project a unique touch by taking virtual currencies just like Prague’s Bitcoin Coffee.
Favorite Spot
Presently, the Aungier Street outlet has become a favorite spot for crypto enthusiasts and ‘Hodlers’ with a Coinbase screen showing real-time crypto price updates.
There’s also a graffiti on the wall that says “Hodl 4 Life”, which is a motto for bitcoin investors urging everyone in the crypto community to remain strong and hold onto their coins no matter how low price falls. The word came to life as a result of a typographical error of “hold.”
Basel’s Café is also a favorite venue for Blockchain and crypto meetups in Dublin.
Currently, the cafe accepts litecoin and ethereum payments because they have much lower fees compared to the king of crypto, bitcoin. But as bitcoin transaction fees begin to reduce, the cafe will soon start supporting bitcoin too.
Basel said that fewer than twenty people have paid with the virtual currencies since it started operating due to the crypto bloodbath.
“When you’re winning [on cryptocurrency investments] you’re spending, as the coffee might be less than 1 Euro at the time; but if you’re losing 50 percent, the coffee might cost you six Euros,” he noted.
When the entrepreneur gets paid in cryptocurrency, he decides whether to exchange it for fiat or to keep it in his digital wallet. “It definitely will be a standard currency; it’s gotten too big already to ignore,” Mr. Basel concluded.