Binance partners with Koinal to enable credit card crypto purchases
The world’s largest digital currency exchange, Binance, has struck a partnership with London-based payment processing firm Koinal, which will enable users to purchase several crypto assets with credit and debit cards.
Announcing the partnership yesterday, Binance said that “users in supported countries can buy bitcoin and other digital assets with a debit or credit card at the lowest fees through the Binance Fiat Gateway”. The assets available for purchase via the new method are the five largest digital coins – Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), XRP, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Litecoin (LTC).
“Freedom to convert easily between fiat and cryptocurrency is key to bringing crypto further mainstream. As the blockchain industry matures, there is more demand to bridge the two worlds than ever before,” Binance’s chief executive officer, Changpeng Zhao, said in a statement. “At Binance, we want to provide users with the easiest way to enter and thrive in the crypto space. At the infrastructure level, we will continue to build fiat-to-crypto gateways in our effort to increase accessibility and adoption of crypto.”
In a subsequent blog post Binance said that Koinal charged 2.5% per transaction. According to the company, on average, it takes from five to 20 minutes for a purchased asset to reach a user’s Binance wallet.
The announcement of the partnership came just shortly after Binance launched a US-based trading platform offering a number of fiat-to-crypto and crypto-to-crypto trading pairs. The new platform initially announced support for Bitcoin, Ether, XRP, Bitcoin Cash, Binance Coin (BNB), Litecoin and Tether, but later added five more digital coins – Cardano (ADA), asic Attention Token (BAT), Ethereum Classic (ETC), Stellar (XLM) and 0x (ZRX).
Meanwhile, Binance’s native token, BNB, has seen big losses in recent trading. As of 15:08 BST on Wednesday, the BNB price stood at $15.77, down 17.2% from the same time yesterday. The steep decline seems to be part of a larger downtrend observed across the digital currency market.
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