Apple Pay continues to make moves as one of the most versatile mobile payment and digital wallet services. They continue to stay one step ahead of the competition by offering users the ability to pay for goods and services using cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Bitcoin.
How does Apple Pay work?
Apple pay functions as a digital wallet allowing you to use your phone to pay for goods and services. Your debit card and credit card information isn’t actually stored on the device. When you sign up your card for apple pay, the card issuer gives Apple a Device Account Number and a dynamic key. That information is encrypted, sent to your phone, and stored in something called a Secure Element Chip. The Secure Element Chip is completely isolated from iOS. You can think of the chip as an island and the phone as a country. The country and the island can communicate but if the country gets compromised, the island can isolate itself.
When you use Apple Pay at a store, your device sends the Device Account Number to the retailer through Near Field Communication or NFC for short. The retailer’s receiver takes your Device Account Number, a transaction specific security code, and confirms them both with the card issuer. If the card issuer verifies the details are correct the transaction gets approved.
How does Apple pay work with Ethereum?
Apple Pay allows you to sign up with different credit and debit cards. They just approved BitPay which is essentially a debit card for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other Crypto. Every time you make a purchase through Apple Pay with your BitPay card, BitPay takes your let’s say your Ethereum for example, and converts it into fiat which is regular money such as (US Dollars or Australian Dollars). That regular money is used to pay retailers for goods and services.
When you’re buying Ethereum, you can top-up your BitPay card by connecting it with an exchange, such as Independent Reserve.
What this means for Apple
It looks like Apple is at the forefront of innovation. They want to stay ahead of the curve by supporting cryptocurrency before competitors like Google and Samsung. Speculators even think that Apple might eventually start their own Cryptocurrency Exchange. This could stand to make them over 40 Billion dollars. Whether they make a move on it or not it’s too early to tell. It wouldn’t be a surprise if they did. Tesla used 1.5 billion dollars of its cash reserves to purchase Bitcoin. One week later the company made more money from that investment than they did selling cars in 2020, a 1 billion dollar profit. Will Apple follow in their footsteps? Your guess is as good as mine.
What this means for cryptocurrency
This latest move by Apple also legitimizes Cryptocurrency further. The more media attention, adoption, and transactions that occur on networks like Ethereum and Bitcoin, the more promising the industry seems.
