Social media and discussion platform Reddit disabled payments in Bitcoin last week despite being an early adopter of the cryptocurrency. Before that, users buying a premium membership had the choice of BTC as a payment option. According to a Reddit board administrator nicknamed emoney04, the social media platform decided to give up on BTC payments after Coinbase discontinued its Merchant Tool product in an attempt to move to a new system called Coinbase Commerce.
“Yup that’s right. The upcoming Coinbase change, combined with some bugs around the Bitcoin payment option that were affecting purchases for certain users, led us to remove Bitcoin as a payment option,” emoney04 stated on Saturday.
In mid-February, Coinbase announced its new commerce platform, which would resemble PayPal. If merchants accept to deal with the platform, their clients will find a Coinbase Commerce button in the payment section, which will be something similar to the PayPal button.
Coinbase Commerce will make it easy for third parties to accept payments in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin. Last month, Coinbase said that Canadian e-commerce major Shopify, which was previously accepting BTC, would be one of the first merchants to use the new system. Other services that allow Bitcoin payments are Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK), and Expedia (NASDAQ:EXPE).
However, emoney04 said that Reddit might restart its service if Coinbase’s commerce tool works well.
“We're going to take a look at demand and watch the progression of Coinbase Commerce before making a decision on whether to reenable,” he wrote.
Reddit began accepting payments in Bitcoin in 2013. The social media users could buy the Reddit Gold membership with BTC thanks to a partnership between Reddit and crypto exchange Coinbase.
Last week, Reddit's r/cryptocurrency subreddit came up with some new rules to better organize the crypto community there. One of the rules banned the use of memes.
This article appeared first on Cryptovest
