There’s more than meets the eye with HandCash Pay gift cards

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BREAKING: Cash out your BSV using eGift Cards

Users always needed a way to cash out BSV. Now we have the perfect solution. eGift cards make it easy to finance your life with BSV. Mastercard, Amazon, and much more.

You can get started now, we’re live! https://t.co/x7uC7j4mj8 pic.twitter.com/WU3ZjZRKxB

— HandCash (@handcashapp) April 20, 2023

HandCash has launched a simple web application to instantly buy digital or physical gift cards via their HandCash Pay stack. Customers can purchase Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Visa (NASDAQ: V), Nintendo (NASDAQ: NTDOF) eShop, and Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) among the 1,000 plus cards available worldwide with Bitcoin SV (BSV). Amidst the continuous de-listings of the digital currency, this feature provides a simple means to cash out via Visa or MasterCard (NASDAQ: MA) gift cards or to a plethora of goods or services.

For example, users can purchase up to as little as $0.01 of an Amazon gift card. Upon clicking Buy with BSV, a HandCash Pay link appears. With either your HandCash or SimplyCash wallet, simply scan the QR code and pay, then the gift card will instantly be sent to your linked email address. If on mobile, you can conveniently open your app and simply click Pay instead of scanning a QR code.

This smooth payment process is enabled by the Pay APIs launched by the team last year, where arbitrary data (such as email address or other customer pertinent information) is embedded in the QR code and/or web request. Upon paying, a remote server is notified of the payment and executes the sending of the gift card. This method is much more secure and cheaper to process than the traditional credit card payment process, where businesses must necessarily link customer information to sensitive data such as card numbers (or tokens), CVV codes, and expiration dates. Purchasing gift cards incurs zero fees.

For gift cards? ZERO

— HandCash (@handcashapp) April 21, 2023

Any wallet that implements the BIP270 protocol can support purchases of gift cards, which is why Simply Cash is immediately supported. Additionally, because the payment requests are HTTP calls, any third party application can easily implement this. The team will also add support for other wallets, tokens, and digital currencies.

Due to the flexible nature of Bitcoin outputs, split payments such as referrals and automatic cashback rewards are all possible. On the topic of cashback, HandCash Pay natively supports expiration dates, so the company could run timed promotional periods of cashback to incentivize purchases. Furthermore, the reward discount can be done in the same transaction or potentially with tokens or non-fungible tokens (NFTs) via their upcoming Ordinals support, such as rewarding the first 100 purchases of a Visa gift card between 11-12 UTC to earn a limited-edition PayPistol gun NFT.

Gift card purchases will be natively supported in the application and wallet with the release of HandCash 5.0, which was delayed due to the USDC integration halted by Circle earlier this year. Fiat on-ramps will still be unavailable, but the in-demand feature will be available soon. With top-ups re-enabled, HandCash essentially will have a good enough on- and off-boarding experience so users can buy and spend their BSV.

Of course, product launches always face criticism, and the two biggest are this feature being nothing new and that no user wants to “cash out” their BSV when the price is at all-time lows. While it is true that gift card purchases with Bitcoin have been possible for years, the novelty here is the combination with the flexible Pay APIs.

The HandCash team could start implementing very interesting payout and reward schemes with various businesses. For example, different Pay links can have different metadata attached and/or revenue sharing, which would indicate from which channels (direct link, different Twitter accounts, in-app) users are purchasing the most. Timed discounts or unique rewards can be applied for different, specific channels to create hype and FOMO (fear of missing out). The possibilities are endless with this tech, and I look forward to what the team does next.

Watch: HandCash in unlocking the Internet of value—here’s how