Steak ’n Shake Says Bitcoin Helps Beef Up Sales

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The program is an example of the growing use of cryptocurrency as a payment method for everyday purchases.

“The range of goods and services purchasable with cryptocurrency has expanded far beyond the early days of novelty transactions,” PYMNTS wrote last week.

“Today, consumers can use digital assets to book travel, purchase consumer electronics, pay for cloud services, acquire luxury goods, and even settle recurring bills through intermediaries that convert crypto into local currency at the point of sale.”

However, the most important shift might not involve consumers making the decision to pay with crypto, but might come from stablecoin cards that let users hold value outside banks while spending within the card ecosystem.

“The competition around these products is less about retail payments themselves and more about which institutions will control the monetary layer beneath them, as they, in effect, represent a structural decoupling of deposit capture from payment activity,” PYMNTS added.

This situation has placed card networks like Visa and Mastercard, stablecoin issuers such as Circle and Paxos, and FinTechs, exchanges and wallets in a “three-sided race.”

Card companies are scrambling to weave stablecoins into their rails “before disintermediation risk materializes,” the report said, while the stablecoin issuers are seeking “to become the monetary layer those networks must carry.”

FinTechs, exchanges and wallets, meanwhile, are battling for customer ownership and program issuance.