Flexa adds Regal Cinemas to its growing list of merchant partners, which include Starbucks and Whole Foods.
Regal Cinemas has partnered with Flexa, a digital payments platform, to accept Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and Basic Attention token, amongst others for tickets and confectionery. USD Coin and DAI will also be accepted. This will be available at Regal Cinemas in 42 of the states in the U.S., which house 6885 screens in 514 theaters. When customers pay at Regal with Flexa apps, guests will be able to link their Regal Crown Club Loyalty account for rewards.
Flexa is a merchant-centric platform, that uses Flexa’s ERC-20 token, called Amp which can be staked as collateral. This collateral receives extra Amp as a staking incentive.
Regal is in a continuous partnership with Flexa to help it enable better payments across multiple assets and protocols, including the Lightning Network. Flexa enables the acceptance of digital assets using existing software and hardware.
How Does Flexa Work?
Over 80% of retail spending in the U.S. is done at physical stores, and getting cryptocurrency to integrate with fiat payment rails used by physical stores has proven cumbersome and expensive for retailers to adopt until Flexa came to abstract away the complexities of engaging with a distributed ledger and digital wallets. In 2019, Flexa reached agreements with some established retail players like Whole Foods and Starbucks to accept payments using the Flexa app.
When a purchase needs to be made, the Flexa Spedn app creates a barcode called “Flexcode” which onboarded merchants may scan to authorize and guarantee transactions instantly. Flexa pays merchants in convertible virtual currency or their fiat currency of choice. Flexa’s software-development kit deducts the crypto accordingly from the user’s digital wallet from within the Flexa app. Customers need to load supported digital assets to their secure SPEDN wallets.
Flexa has partnered with the Winklevoss-owned Gemini exchange, which handles the sometimes cumbersome on-chain transfers, allowing the in-store system to operate speedily. Without Flexa, micro-payments using crypto at stores like Starbucks become infeasible.
Cinemas Help Offline Adoption
The AMC cinema chain started accepting BTC, ETH, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin as a form of payment in Nov. 2021. The CEO of AMC Adam Aron created a Twitter poll, asking if people would like to use Dogecoin as payment, to which almost 70% of the approximate 120000 participants responded “yes.” This was followed by the enablement of gift card purchases using Dogecoin, which could be redeemed to purchase movie tickets together with concessions online.
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