One of the largest movie theater chains in the US, AMC Entertainment made an announcement on Monday during an earnings call that the company is preparing IT infrastructure to accept bitcoin by end of this year. To remind readers, AMC became a popular meme stock star favored by retail traders on Reddit’s infamous WallStreetBet forum.
We are also in the preliminary stage of now exploring how else AMC can participate in this new burgeoning cryptocurrency universe and we’re quite intrigued by potentially lucrative business opportunities for AMC if we intelligently pursue further serious involvement with cryptocurrency.
AMC CEO, Adam Aron
The current crypto market sentiment is again in a bullish mode after months where ETH crossed the $3000 mark and BTC jumped to $45000 the first time after May this year. The recent rebound came amid optimism that a cryptocurrency compromise will be included as part of the bipartisan infrastructure package. The Senate ultimately failed to advance the deal.
AMC has not yet specified what specific technology they will use to process bitcoin payments but Adam mentioned that the company’s IT team is working on it. He also hinted that AMC will start accepting Google Pay and Apple Pay payment options as well. AMC has 500+ movie theaters in the U.S alone and 350+ international locations.
Also, read - Apple Pay payment option is now available on Coinbase, Google Pay to follow
Bitcoin is seeing major adoption this year across countries and institutions. All major financial institutions and banks are opening up for providing crypto services to their client. Citi Bank, JP Morgan, etc have already announced their stand on crypto and agreed to provide financial service to wealthy clients, to begin with. Bitcoin also saw country-wide adoption this year. El Salvador was the first one to make Bitcoin a legal tender, a move that is now been followed by other Central American countries like Paraguay, Panama.
Major global companies that accept bitcoin include PayPal and Starbucks through the Bakkt app, which converts cryptocurrency into payment. Tesla, which accepted bitcoin as payment earlier this year, eventually halted accepting it in May over Bitcoin mining energy concerns. However, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk said in July that the company will likely start accepting bitcoin again once it checks that bitcoin’s “percentage of renewable energy usage is most likely at or above 50%.”
