Thanks to the partnership between bitcoin wallet Snapcard and Brazilian mobile payments company PagPop, 12,000 Brazilian businesses can receive bitcoin payments by default, says Bitcoin Magazine.

PagPop enables Brazilian merchants to receive credit card payments via smartphones, tablets and magnetic stripe reader. The partnership with Snapcard adds bitcoin to standard PagPop payment options. Users can conduct payment operations and store funds solely in bitcoin. Should they prefer local currency, they would automatically receive Brazilian Reals on their bank accounts within 24 hours.

Michael Dunworth, CEO of Snapcard, believes that “bitcoin can flourish as a currency” in Brazil because of the weakness of the Brazilian Real. Besides being paid on the next day is very quick by Latin American standards: Dunworth claims that usually when merchants accept a credit card the processing would take up to 30 days.

Snapcard is a bitcoin start-up that provides online tools for bitcoin integration for offline and online payments. The wallet works with 20 local currencies and 3 digital currencies including bitcoin, litecoin, and dogecoin. In July it partnered with AlphaHub online merchant platform and with Ifeelgoods digital rewards platform.

Volatility of the Brazilian national currency leads to an explosive interest in bitcoin. Dozens of bitcoin-accepting merchants can be found in every big Brazilian city, such as Rio de Janeiro, São Paolo, Porto Alegre, Curitiba, and  Aracaju.

Alexey Tereshchenko