Crypto ATMs Defy Crypto Winter: What’s Next?
Although bears have been ruling the crypto markets for over a year now, the growth in Crypto ATMs continues to demonstrate a bullish trend. This is despite the fact that current Crypto ATM services are still lagging behind in operational efficiencies. The question is — what’s next?
The growth of Crypto ATMs continues to be exponential despite the long and protracted bearish crypto market. Reported to reach $145 million by 2023, we believe there’s more to it than meets the eye.
Cumulatively installed over the last 5–6 years, currently there are 4423 Crypto ATMs run by 545 operators across 77 countries.
Almost 5 Crypto ATMs are added each day. With 2715 locations, the United States by far has the largest number of Crypto ATMs. Canada takes the number 2 spot with 685 locations. Next three of the top five spots are taken by Austria (268 locations), United Kingdom (225 locations) and Spain (83 locations).
Europe is lagging far behind North America in the density of Crypto ATMs.
Almost all Crypto ATMs support bitcoins, while some of them support multiple altcoins. About 60% Crypto ATMs support only “buy” operations while 40% support both “buy and sell.”
While average fee the operators are charging is estimated at about 8.18%, “it is pretty normal to see 15% fees on the US market.”
Issues
- Some Crypto ATMs may be using the term “blockchain” in branding their services, but as of now, none of the Crypto ATMs actually are decentralized and operating on the blockchain
- Legal and regulatory uncertainty of cryptocurrency is slowing down Crypto ATM growth
- Stubbornly high fees are placing a limit on customer usage
- Crypto ATMs provide very limited buy and sell services, leaving full feature crypto exchange services to mainstream crypto exchanges
- Crypto ATMs can be strategically positioned to radically change the face of legacy banking systems with convergence, but that potential remains unexplored in current breed of ATMs.
Future
Decentralization with blockchain will solve most of the issues Crypto ATMs are facing today. It will ease up the legal and regulatory constraints as a decentralized system does not hold consumer assets and therefore remains fairly fraud-proof. With fee as high as 15%, today’s centralized Crypto ATMs seriously lack scaling up potential to mass adaption. Blockchain can lower the transaction fee, and thus attract more buyers and sellers who can trade at very competitive rates. Blockchain, in the long run, can even merge crypto with conventional ATMs.
Moreover, the future of Crypto ATMs lies in convergence. Convergence of all the components of a typical cryptocurrency ecosystem. As proclaimed by a UN agency, it’s time for convergence for banking and sustainability.
Convergence in sustainability sciences refers to mechanisms and pathways that lead towards sustainability.
Eventually, the convergence of all the diverse financial services beyond just dispensing cash, such as money transfer, payments, fixed deposits, loans, credits, algorithmic trading of currencies and stocks, crowdfunding, etc. into a single remote convergent and sustainable automated teller machine that does it all, seems inevitable.
Blockchain makes that convergence smooth and easy, and most importantly its fundraising tokenomics makes the Convergent ATMs — or should we say Sustainable Teller Machines (STMs) — the next billion dollar opportunity that the world is waiting to see since the 2018 ICO fiesta that created several multi-billion blockchain enterprises.
No hesitation at all to conclude that Sustainable Teller Machines spell — The beginning of the end of the legacy banking system.
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