6,500 French Shops To Sell Bitcoin By February

Earlier this week, six tobacco stores in France became the first stores of their kind to sell Bitcoin as a result of a deal with a fintech company which intends to expand the sale of the leading cryptocurrency to over 6,450 more shops by February.

The company in question is Keplerk and was announced to be partnering up with tobacco stores in the nation back in November to make Bitcoin an easy purchase, just like cigarettes!

This is just the start though as Keplerk is aiming to bring aboard as much as 6,500 more stores next month, in what looks to be a perfect working example of Bitcoin adoption for the country.

Networking

The partnership might seem quite strange at first - I mean, of all the places to sell Bitcoin is a tobacco shop the best place when there are whole websites and mobile applications dedicated to the ‘art’.

But the co-founder of Keplerk, Adil Zakhar has said that the reason for this is that cryptocurrencies are still a novelty for many people. He continues to say that the thoughts of buying some weird, ‘internet money’ is something many people will just straight up avoid.

Selling the leading cryptocurrency in a real, physical store should encourage more people to purchase. As reported by BTC Manger, it gives people a sense of legitimacy with Bitcoin and the people that use tobacco shops will most likely already have a friendly relationship with the owner(s) and manager(s). Having an actual person selling Bitcoin is much better than just a website or app doing it.

This is the point that Zakhar is trying to prove saying, “they trust their local tobacco shop owner more than they would trust some remote anonymous website.”

Benefits for shop owners

Store owners will have a wealth of benefits with this as tobacco sales haven’t exactly been on the up recently and so the sale of Bitcoin should help them enter a new market and thus, boost profits.

This is what sparked the deal last year in which Keplerk joined forces with the cash register company to allow Bitcoin vouchers to be sold in local stores.

There has been more than 24,000 registered tobacco stores which have diversified their shops over the past year so the goal of 6,500 seems to be reachable.

What are your thoughts? Let us know what you think down below in the comments!