United States telecom and media giant AT&T now accepting cryptocurrency for paying phone bills online, according to an official press release on May 23. AT&T will process bills paid in cryptocurrency using crypto payments platform BitPay.
BitPay is a platform that converts cryptocurrencies to fiat and is used by over 20,000 businesses. AT&T is reportedly the first United States-based business in the wireless network industry to offer bill payments with BitPay.
Kevin McDorman, vice president of AT&T Communications Finance Business Operations, said, “We have customers who use cryptocurrency, and we are happy we can offer them a way to pay their bills with the method they prefer.”
Near the end of 2018, AT&T announced that it was working on a suite of blockchain solutions compatible with Microsoft Azure and the IBM Blockchain Platform. The stated aim of the suite is to provide “additional transparency and accountability to even the most complex supply chains” for institutional customers in fields such as manufacturing, retail, and healthcare.
AT&T also filed a patent application — which was published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in December — for a blockchain-based “social media history map” that would allow a network such as AT&T to gather its subscribers’ social media “transaction” data. As per the application:
“The social media history map platforms described herein may take advantage of the immutable and permanent nature of blockchain records to store, and provide access to, data representing online transactions that occur on multiple social media applications.”
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