Indian rupees to Bitcoin exchange Unocoin is working to enable physical stores and merchants in India to easily be paid with the cryptocurrency for their goods and services. Unocoin announced the launch of its mobile merchant Point of Sale (PoS) application – called the “Unocoin PoS“ – for both Android and iOS devices.
Established in late 2013, the Indian startup raised $250,000 from Barry Silbert the founder and CEO of Digital Currency Group in 2014. Unocoin's goal is to make bitcoin accessible to billions of people, and it now boasts that: “Over the past year, our web traffic has increased by more than 500%. We added more than 6,000 users just last month alone and our volume is skyrocketing.”
In order to accept bitcoin from customers via the app, an Indian merchant needs to sign up with Unocoin, get his/her account verified and scan a QR code from the website to pair the mobile app to the Merchant Account . To create an invoice in bitcoin, the merchant simply opens the Unocoin PoS app, keys in the invoice amount and generates a QR code to accept bitcoin payment from the customer.
The merchants can accept bitcoin on the spot or send the payment instructions to the customer if he is not physically present in the same location. The merchants will have an option to either keep the payment in bitcoin or to have it converted into Indian rupees and have the money sent to their bank account on the same business day.
Last year Unocoin has partnered with Purse.io to complete the cycle from global crowdsourcing marketplace Mechanical Turk to Indian rupees.
