Aussies buy fuel and chips with crypto across 175 fuel outlets

Convenience store and service station brand On The Run (OTR) has launched crypto payment support at all 175 of its service stations and convenience stores across Victoria, South Australia (SA) and Western Australia (WA) from Thursday.

As previously reported, the move is part of a collaboration between OTR, Singapore-based exchange Crypto.com and DataMesh, a Sydney-based payment system provider.

Børsen has delivered its Pay Merchant service as a payment settlement layer, while Datamesh has delivered the retail terminals.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Crypto.com’s Asia & Pacific general manager Karl Mohan noted that it only took “eight weeks from the point of proof of concept to the point of actually getting a fully scalable production-ready environment.”

Mohan noted that while 175 OTR stores have initially been equipped with the infrastructure, the crypto payment service is operationally ready to scale much further.

“What’s happening now is that any merchant, whether you’re a cafe owner or someone who runs thousands of stores, can just plug and play,” he said.

In addition to the 175 stores, OTR’s parent company Peregrine Corp intends to roll out the crypto payment service to an additional 250 retail locations across the country such as Subway, Porto and Krispy Kreme.

Mohan also stated that Crypto.com charges zero fees on the transactions in this context. However, there will be fees on the seller’s side, who will set their own prices. This may indicate that the transaction costs may be similar to fiat card payments.

When asked what would be needed to make crypto payments widely used in Australia, especially given the tax obligations of paying with crypto assets, Mohan believed that the use of an Australian dollar-backed stablecoin could be the key:

So of course Bitcoin and Ethereum due to their market capitalization are already at the top of the list. But an overwhelming number of consumers have said they are ready to accept and actually start paying with Australian stablecoins.

“We’ve made the system available and if you’ve seen ANZ announce the Australian dollar stablecoin and we see these types of stablecoins becoming available, I really think it will become mainstream,” he added.

So far, the ANZ bank has piloted its A$DC stablecoin purely for private institutional purposes, but if it is eventually opened up to the retail market, Mohan stated that “we would love the opportunity to work with any financial or Australian deposit-taking institution that is interested in to introduce a stablecoin.”