Over the last few months, the amount of institutional support that the crypto institution has received has been remarkable. 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.
Since then, there has been a lot of speculation about what company is going to embrace bitcoin next, and in seemingly every interview with company executives, this question is asked. The latest of these was with Etsy, a popular online marketplace.
Etsy and Bitcoin
The question of Etsy and the potential for bitcoin in its future was brought up during its Chief Executive Officer Josh Silverman’s interview with CNBC. When quizzed about this, Silverman clarified that there are no immediate plans for the company to accept bitcoin as a form of payment.
The reason for this, he said, is that not enough people are making use of bitcoin at the moment and that more people need to use and own bitcoin before Etsy will consider it. This is not to suggest that Silverman himself is against bitcoin.
On the contrary, Silverman confirmed that he has held on to bitcoin as an investment for roughly seven years as he sees it as a viable investment. Despite this, he does not feel that bitcoin is ready to be used as a medium of exchange on Etsy.
More and more people use cryptocurrency than ever before and more merchants are able to accept it but Silverman’s statement calls into question whether the asset is truly ready for large-scale use. One of the reasons that Tesla gave for its $1.5 billion bitcoin investment was to provide liquidity for when they begin receiving payments in bitcoin.
However, the situation at both firms isn’t the same. Tesla delivered 180,000 cars in the last quarter of 2021 while Etsy has almost 40 million users worldwide. Should bitcoin become more widely used, we can expect more companies at the level of Etsy to embrace the use of digital currency.
Etsy is not the only company that is avoiding the use of bitcoin for now as Twitter’s CFO stated in a recent interview that there are no current plans to add bitcoin to the social media giant’s balance sheet.
