Best Cryptocurrency Coins For Commerce

Every day, more and more businesses are choosing to let customers pay for their products and services with cryptocurrency—giving Stripe, Paypal and other payment platforms a run for their money.

As a truly international medium of exchange, cryptocurrency offers significant advantages to online businesses. Liberated from the demands of middlemen, transactions can have minimal fees, irreversible payments, and almost instantaneous settlement,

The only challenges are secure storage, the risk of fluctuating value, and the need to sell it for dollars or pounds eventually—but these can be taken care off with solutions like Uphold Solutions.

So if you want to get that First Mover advantage, then these are a few of the coins that Uphold supports, and you should consider accepting:

Bitcoin—The Most Widely Recognized/Accepted Crypto

The most famous purchase made with bitcoin was pizza—for a princely sum of 10,000 bitcoins back in 2010. The same amount of bitcoin could now purchase you several houses, a luxury yacht, or a few Lamborghini Diablos. The currency can now buy such a wide range of goods that some bold fans have dared to try living on bitcoin alone.

As the most widely accepted cryptocurrency, bitcoin is the obvious choice for online store owners dipping their toes into the world of crypto. Even though the currency is now ten years old, it has withstood the test of time. That’s despite spawning hundreds of spin-offs, all with various supposed improvements—faster confirmation times, different consensus algorithms, different transaction ordering methods, and all sorts of weird and fantastic features that are just tiny variations of the original innovation that is bitcoin.

With low fees for even large transactions, bitcoin is suited to transactions of all sizes, except micropayments, like cups of coffee, for which the fees can make the cost too high to be worthwhile.

Median fee per transaction: 0.141 USD Average transaction size: 0.065 BTC ($435.65 USD)

DASH—Designed for eCommerce

In Venezuela, the native currency has been rendered nearly worthless by hyperinflation. While catastrophic for its citizens, the financial instability has provided a convenient testing ground for DASH—an amalgamation of digital and cash—which has become a popular way to pay for everyday goods and services.

Another crypto built on bitcoin’s codebase, Dash was explicitly designed for shopping—fast transaction speeds and seamless user experience make the protocol well-suited to daily transactions

The DASH InstantSend feature can radically speed up confirmation times, allowing the crypto to compete with credit cards for instantaneous POS transactions. With this in hand, they aim to take down the likes of PayPal and become the world’s leading e-commerce ecosystem.

Median fee per transaction: 0.106 USD per transaction Average transaction size: 0.033 DASH ($8.04 USD)

Litecoin—A Faster, Cheaper Bitcoin

If bitcoin is digital gold, then litecoin is digital silver. As bitcoin’s closest rival, it has several advantages over the original, including low fees and swift transaction speeds—an advantage of its small size and relative lack of popularity.

Based on the same code as bitcoin, litecoin works just like its more popular counterpart, but is currently worth less than bitcoin, #7 on Coinmarketcap and has a greater circulating supply —there are 21 million bitcoin in existence, and 84 million litecoin, this makes it well-suited to small “micropayment” purchases like cups of coffee.

Litecoin acceptance is growing among merchants, and the crypto has benefited from integration with South Korea’s largest e-commerce platform. More recently, Litecoin has joined the aviation industry, giving Tapjets and Surf Air customers a new way to pay.

Median fee per transaction: 0.03 USD Average transaction size: 1.6 LTC ($132.49 USD)

XRP—The Banker’s Favorite

Not to be confused with Ripple – the proprietary payment technology, XRP is the cryptocurrency produced by the same company.

This is one of the only cryptocurrencies that has been embraced by financial institutions, and its tried and tested network offers low fees and lightning fast transactions, attracting support from hedge funds, banks, and American Express.

Ripple and XRP’s specialty is real-time cross-border payments on behalf of merchants and consumers, including invoice payments and e-commerce payments. To this end, they have formed partnerships with banks all over the world.

Median fee per transaction: 0.0012 USD

Uphold Solutions

If you’re interested in joining mainstream websites like Microsoft, Dell, and WordPress by accepting cryptocurrency, then Uphold’s service for businesses offers an easy and convenient way to do so.

By connecting cryptocurrency with traditional financial networks, the Uphold ecosystem radically reduces costs for financial transactions and services—from currency conversions to international money transfers and bill payment.

Merchants can choose to accept all the top cryptocurrencies—Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ripple, Ethereum and more—and have the option to store these or offload them immediately to save value in a wide range of world currencies and precious metals.