CashApp – the mobile payment service developed by Block – announced many major Bitcoin-related upgrades on Thursday. One of the new integrations allows users to automatically convert their incoming paychecks into Bitcoin.
Another Wave of Bitcoin Features
CashApp is already well versed in Bitcoin and its surrounding technology. It already allows users to buy Bitcoin on top of stocks and send lightning network payments to wallets capable of receiving them.
In fact, another of today’s upgrades allows CashApp to receive lightning payments as well. That puts the app on both sides of Bitcoin’s premiere layer 2 scaling solution, which allows for transactions far cheaper and faster than on-chain ones. Yesterday, Bitcoin payment provider “Bitpay” began allowing its merchants to do the same.
As for its “Get Paid in Bitcoin” service, users can also automatically convert any percentage of their fiat wages into Bitcoin, which is sent to CashApp via automated compensation rails. According to Miles Sutter – Crypto Product Manager at CashApp – the service is completely free.
“This is the largest deployment of a feature like this at scale to date,” he explained at the Bitcoin 2022 Conference earlier today. “We already have a significant number of customers receiving recurring paychecks into CashApp.”
The app works by simply selecting a percentage of salary to convert to bitcoin and pressing “done”. Apparently, NFL free offensive tackle Russell Okung was the first to pitch the idea to the company in 2019. Although other companies like Coinbase and Strike have already launched similar services, most of them they are native crypto/Bitcoin companies.
The third integration is called “Bitcoin roundups”, which lets users auto-convert their spare change into Bitcoin. Specifically, when users make payments using their Cash Card, the app will round payments up to the nearest dollar, and invest the remainder into the cryptocurrency.
Improving Bitcoin UX
Finally, the company is now focusing on improving the user experience for Bitcoin transactions. It will use unified QR codes that merge channel details with a lightning bill for BItcoin payments.
“Customers shouldn’t care about what rails they’re sending BItcoin over,” continued Sutter. “It should just be a seamless, intuitive experience. One magic QR code, scan it, and it just works.”
Interestingly, this is not new technology. It was introduced to the BIP-21 many years ago and just “needed a boost to proliferate throughout the ecosystem”. However, BIP-21 is backward compatible, which means it still works with wallets that have not yet been upgraded to enable the Lightning Network.
