TL;DR

• Hardware wallet maker SafePal just bought a bank, so its users can bank with USDC instead of fiat, and use an Apple Pay-friendly debit card to spend their crypto.

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In today’s “our phones are definitely listening to us” news:

Remember yesterday when we harped on about the importance of having ‘slippery’ fiat-to-crypto on ramps/off ramps?

Well — check out the headline that just popped up in our news feed:

“Crypto Wallet SafePal Ventures Into Banking With New USDC Visa Card“

Here’s the basic gist of what’s happening:

SafePal make hardware wallets (these calculator lookin’ things), and want to make the ‘moving cash into crypto’ process smoother, so — get this:

They went out and bought a bank, called Fiat24.

(Or invested heavily in it, at least).

The result being: customers can have a bank account that stores USDC stablecoins, instead of actual US dollars.

Which seems insignificant on the surface — but that means funds of any size can be moved in seconds (and for pennies on the dollar), instead of days (and for a 1-3% cut of the total amount being moved).

Plus! They’ll even give you a debit card to spend your crypto directly at stores.

Which technically means you’ll now be able to spend crypto via Apple Pay (we never thought we’d utter those words).

But besides all of that, here’s what we love most about this solution…

The ‘fiat-to-crypto’ transfer process will no longer exist in the mind of the end user. It’ll all be done quietly in the background, and at the moment of payment — making crypto not only the cheaper option, but the easier one.

We love to see it!