'Covering our bases': aXpire invests in Moon

aXpire has made an undisclosed investment in US crypto payments startup Moon (aka PayWithMoon) and added the company to its blockchain community.

“Moon is creating a payments application which shares some of the same user base as our PayBX application. We believe this overlap to be positive,” it says in a Medium post.

“By investing in Moon, we’re securing ourselves a partnership that will serve to improve both parties. We also get the added benefit of “covering our bases”, ensuring upside in case their take on cryptocurrency payments achieves greater success. We’ve got two payments applications, each with an entirely different approach. We believe there is room for both.”

Amazon

It is now possible to buy stuff on Amazon with Bitcoin et al, thanks to Moon. The venture recently announced that any Lightning Network-enabled wallet could now be used through its Chrome browser extension. Prior to this, a small group of beta users tapped Moon to spend crypto on e-commerce sites by connecting the browser extension to exchange accounts like Coinbase.

“[The extension] will pop up a QR code and it will have the Lightning invoice, which you could also copy and paste if you can’t use the QR code for some reason, and you’ll be able to pay with your favourite Lightning wallet,” Moon CEO Ken Kruger told CoinDesk.

As an added bonus, it was also possible to get 5% off during Prime Day 2019 when using Moon at Amazon.com. “We're hoping this will help adoption by incentivising the average consumer to learn about Bitcoin and use it for payments,” Kruger said. “Especially since this is the first Prime Day where you can shop directly on Amazon with Bitcoin.”