In El Salvador, McDonald’s Has Started Accepting Bitcoin

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In El Salvador, McDonald’s Has Started Accepting Bitcoin

This week brought some of the most significant but underrated pieces of crypto news of this year. On Tuesday, El Salvador became the first sovereign government to adopt the original cryptocurrency of bitcoin as legal tender alongside its current legal tender, the U.S. dollar.

El Salvador’s adoption of BTC allows the country’s citizens to pay taxes, purchase services, and pay off debts using bitcoin. It also allows various businesses across the country to widen their payment options to cryptocurrency.

Although El Salvador’s official “Bitcoin Day” had a difficult start as it coincided with a plunge of the cryptocurrency market that saw the price of bitcoin dropping from over $52,000 to under $43,000. The latter price being BTC’s lowest level in almost three weeks.

However, Bitcoin recovered to just under $46,957 not long after, relieving some anxiety of those in El Salvador. But this wasn’t the only good crypto news. It was later announced that McDonald’s, the world’s largest fast-food restaurant chain, would be accepting Bitcoin as a legitimate form of payment at all 19 of its restaurants in the country.

The Bitcoin payments to pay for McDonald’s in El Salvador will be handled by OpenNode, a California-based bitcoin payment processor that has recently teamed up with the world’s largest fast-food restaurant chain to allow it to accept BTC. This allows crypto owners to pay inside any El Salvadorian McDonalds, online, or through food delivery apps.

“I just walked into a McDonald’s in San Salvador to see if I could pay for my breakfast with bitcoin … fully expecting to be told no, but low and behold.”

– Aaron van Wirdum, cryptocurrency journalist.

So far, McDonald’s is the first major American company to adjust to El Salvador’s cryptocurrency initiative. But it’s still early days. Ryan Flowers, an OpenNode spokesperson, recently claimed that his company is “currently onboarding multiple multi-billion dollar businesses based in El Salvador.”

Overall, this crypto news is a positive update for El Salvador’s adoption of Bitcoin. If it continues to add to its portfolio of major American companies that accept its newly adopted currency, then we could see the price of BTC and many other cryptocurrencies rise significantly in value. Particularly as many other major companies, like Paypal, are also edging towards mass adoption of Bitcoin as a payment method.