The growing popularity of cryptocurrency has reached the deserved acknowledgment of various industries. So much that a lot of major companies now accept cryptocurrency, particularly Bitcoin and other top-performing cryptocurrencies, as payment for their services. May it be in automotives, credit cards, software, and travel, big players from a lot of industries have already started exploring the decentralized finance space. Barely a week into the new year and the CEO of the vacation rental giant AirBnB, Brian Chesky, posted the results of a poll on his official Twitter page where he reveals that the number one request of their users is for the company to also accept cryptocurrency as payment.
But while AirBnB either “working on it or looking into it” is a welcome development for the travel savvy, given the conditions the pandemic has put us in — where so many are left unemployed and travel restrictions are lifted only to soon be reimposed in some parts of the world — these functions, although attractive, are rendered luxurious, if not moot, for a lot of crypto owners. What about the everyday person, then? There has to be more grounded, practical uses for crypto: ones that cater the needs of the many, especially those in emerging markets.
A New Era of Crypto: When DeFi Play-to-Earn Games Helped Families Pay Their Rent
At the height of the pandemic, when the unemployment rate skyrocketed, many have turned to play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity, Splinterlands, and Crypto Blades to aid their livelihoods. Axie Infinity alone, for example, has garnered 2.8 million players as of November 2021, a big percentage of whom have come from emerging markets like Brazil, the Philippines, and Vietnam. And while people do enjoy these games, many of them have seen these games as a supplementary revenue stream, allocated directly and immediately for household needs and utilities..
In a mini-documentary published on YouTube last year that followed a small community in rural Philippines — from a college graduate to an elderly couple — the subjects share how their unemployment led them to playing Axie Infinity, eventually becoming their primary source of income. But how do they do it? How does one use crypto to cover real-world utilities and what kinds of problems does one encounter in doing so?
Off-ramping and its many steps
Off-ramping, or the process in which cryptocurrency is converted into fiat money, often requires a long process, and gas fees for each of its steps.
Collecting your GameFi tokens to transfer them to your Metamask or Binance wallets, then converting them to stablecoin, and selling them on P2P,continually diminishes one’s earnings.
While there are mobile wallets with local support that accept cryptocurrencies, they are mostly compatible with Bitcoin or the Ethereum chain. So what of the owners of other crypto tokens, if without the multiple-chain function, gas fees accumulate and their earnings diminish at every step? If the standard procedure for paying merchants and services using crypto through their mobile wallets involves converting our in-game tokens on an exchange to a stablecoin, then changing it to XRP or ETH, then sending it to a mobile wallet, the transaction fees that would be incurred before they are able to actually pay for different utilities would just accumulate.
How do they then minimize these fees and make the most out of their in-game tokens?
XLD Finance Intervenes at the Right Time with the Right Solution
As NFT gaming continues to get more traction as a major source of income for many in emerging markets, XLD Finance addresses such problems by providing a solution for play-to-earn gamers through xSpend.
With xSpend, users from Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, and the Philippines may now purchase mobile prepaid credits using their GameFi tokens and stablecoin. Users based in the Philippines may also use these to pay directly for local businesses’ goods and services.
Because xSpend is directly connects to wallets like Ronin and Metamask, users may now skip the long process of off-ramping, and directly pay for services by simply connecting to their Web 3.0 wallets, choosing which tokens to spend, selecting the biller they want to pay, and entering their account details.
But it doesn’t stop at just bills. Now more than ever, when the need to stay home and so many of us who work from home rely heavily on deliveries of food and goods, xSpend has added Shopee and Grab among others in an already long list of merchants.
With xSpend Crypto Users Can Pay Their Bills in Three Minutes
While many of the world’s major players have begun enabling crypto payments, with some even allowing users to buy gift cards with cryptocurrencies, that these services will incur hidden fees and do not support GameFi tokens and stable coin alienates the new, and continuously growing, segment of play-to-earn gamers.
There is a strong need for a more convenient and more affordable way to pay for real-world services and everyday needs using gamefi tokens and stablecoins. XLD Finance addresses this with xSpend, through which people in developing nations can now pay for basic services and goods while lessening the gas fees and expediting the process down to three minutes.
To learn more about the XLD Finance ecosystem and be alerted for future updates, please visit our website, xSpend, or follow us on Discord, Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn, and Telegram.
