Gucci is going bananas for ApeCoin.
The Italian fashion house will now accept Bored Ape Yacht Club’s token ApeCoin (APE) for all in-store purchases in select boutiques across the US, according to a tweet shared on Tuesday. Gucci actually started accepting a range of cryptocurrencies back in May, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin and Shiba Inu, but it is the first luxury brand to embrace ApeCoin as a form of payment.
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It seems it won’t be the last, though. Following Gucci’s tweet, TAG Heuer tweeted it too was welcoming the ape. Not only has the Swiss watchmaker integrated Bored Ape’s NFTs into the design of its Calibre E4, but it will also now allow clients in the US to buy watches using APE.
The payments are made possible through partnerships with BitPay. It’s a payment processor that enables businesses to accept cryptocurrency as payment. “We added ApeCoin and Euro Coin because customers of our luxury merchant partners asked for it,” BitPay CEO Stephen Pair said in a statement. “They asked, and we delivered.”
Quite the Web3 pioneer, Gucci has already launched Gucci Town in the Metaverse and worked with SuperRare on an NFT collection. It’s not alone, however. Tiffany & Co., Balenciaga, Lamborghini and Rémy Martin are all using NFTs in various projects. Avenue Foch even sold the world’s most expensive bottle of Champagne with an NFT attached to it. More restaurants and wineries are accepting cryptocurrencies. You can even buy a penthouse or a yacht with bitcoin.
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Despite the hype of crypto, it seems most people may not actually be using it. A report from the Federal Reserve released in May stated that only 3 percent of adults have used crypto tokens to make purchases or transfer funds. In addition, a Bank of America analysis showed that the number of active crypto users had dropped from more than 1 million in November 2021 to less than 500,000 in May 2022.
Regardless, the news appears to have been welcomed by die-hard crypto enthusiasts. Following Gucci’s announcement, ApeCoin’s trading price increased by over 9 percent within 24 hours.
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