Which Companies Accept Bitcoin as a Means of Payment

Bitcoin is the first and most popular coin. Bitcoin has the most developed ecosystem, a huge number of exchanges and wallets that support it. The level of bitcoin adoption continues to grow. According to the latest report of Finder.com the global average level of Bitcoin adoption is 14.6%. This means that more and more stores and service providers are starting to accept cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin. Let's look at the most popular of them.

Companies that accept bitcoin

One of the first supporters of bitcoin was Microsoft, which began accepting the cryptocurrency #1 in 2014 as payment for the purchase of games, applications and other digital content in the Microsoft Store for platforms such as Windows Phone and Xbox. If Microsoft started accepting bitcoins in December 2014, PayPal started working with BTC in September 2014. PayPal's step was aimed at attracting businesses to its platform, not consumers. The disadvantage was the 2-3% commission that businesses paid for credit card transactions. However, this allowed merchants to accept bitcoin payments from customers. PayPal only recently allowed customers to make payments using cryptocurrency with PayPal wallet.

In January 2014, a full nine months before PayPal and almost a year before Microsoft, Overstock.com became the first major retailer to accept bitcoin as payment, although it does not yet accept bitcoin on its mobile site. Whole Foods Market is another major retailer that has started accepting bitcoin since 2019. To accept Bitcoin it uses the payment system Flexa. Whole Foods is owned by Amazon, but Amazon itself does not currently accept bitcoins for purchases made through the world's largest online retailer.

In March 2020 Starbucks joined bitcoin. You can add bitcoin along with things like gift card balances and frequent-flyer miles to the Starbucks app and pay that way.

Online electronics giant Newegg accepts bitcoins directly without the participation of third—party services. Buyers need to choose “Pay with Bitcoins" and go through the delivery procedure.

The Home Depot is applying the Flexa payment system, the same one that Whole Foods uses. It allows customers to accept bitcoin through its own digital scanners without investing in new hardware.

Japanese cashback/shopping site Rakuten enabled users to choose bitcoin as a payment method in 2015. Rakuten made this possible by integrating the Bitnet payment processing platform into its own marketplaces.

Twitch is a streaming video platform. Like Whole Foods, Twitch is owned by Amazon. Also like Whole Foods, it now accepts Bitcoin and other altcoins (bitcoin cash, ether, BUSD, PAX, GUSD, USDC and XRP).

Companies that refused to accept bitcoin

Elon Musk announced in early 2021 that Tesla was buying $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin and accepting the world's most popular cryptocurrency as payment for its cars. However, the jubilation of the crypto community did not last long, Tesla abandoned its desire to use bitcoin after about three months. Musk referred to environmental problems and the huge amount of fossil fuel that needs to be burned to produce one coin.