Best Bitcoin Card for Slovenia

Coffee for crypto – Slovenian shopping centre accepts Bitcoin

In Slovenia’s largest shopping centre, BTC City in Ljubljana, you can soon pay for your purchases in Bitcoin using the Elipay app. The Slovenian startup Eligma has thus created an apparently simple solution to bring cryptos further into the mainstream.

BTC City already sounds suspicious of Bitcoin. So far, however, there had been no connection – the shopping centre with currently over 450 shops has existed since 1954. However, “it flirts with the future”, as it claims in its own magazine, and now wants to take on the blockchain technology. Since many of the shops also accept Bitcoin as a payment method from mid-June, the name of the mall now acquires an extended meaning. Already at the end of last year the Goto Mall in Seoul had introduced the payment possibility with Bitcoin, as we reported.

Scan the QR code, confirm and you’re done

The Slovenian startup Eligma, whose ICO only ended in April this year, has set itself the goal of developing simple and effective crypto solutions for daily shopping. With the help of their Eligma app, they want to make it possible to pay “with crypto in offline stores”. This is primarily intended to address users who do not want to use crypto currencies for trading, but are interested in the very original use case, the payment of goods. In fact, this seems to have been simply implemented. The goods of the participating shops are equipped with a special QR code, which is scanned with Elipay on the smartphone. After confirmation of the purchase, the transaction is already completed. According to Eligma, security in the event of loss of the smartphone, for example, is provided by the fact that the crypto balance is stored in a protected offline wallet. Only those who know the login have access to it.

Coffee for crypto

Already in April Eligma had presented her Elipay system to the Slovenian President Borut Pahor and the Slovak President Andrej Kiska. A meeting with the Slovenian Prime Minister followed at the end of May.

As Eligma announced in her blog, they had presented the app, which is supposed to make it possible to pay with Bitcoin in the future, as part of the Festival of Shopping of Fun in the shopping centre. Slovenian Prime Minister Miro Cerar witnessed how Elipay is used. State Secretary Tadej Slapnik bought him a coffee with Bitcoin. Eligma is convinced that the meetings with the heads of state will further increase interest in Eligma and her pioneering achievements in the business world.

In February of this year, a fake news page caused a sensation in Slovenia. It claimed that an artist had built a “Bitcoin City”. He worked with the Slovenian government and the University of Ljubljana to do this. The city is already expected to be home to 4,000 people. It was also to be based entirely on blockchain technology. He named this city BTC City. Accordingly, he posed for the article picture in front of the lettering of the shopping center. Who would have thought that only a few months later at least one step in this direction would be taken at that photographed location?