Customers Can Spend Bitcoin At Starbucks, Nordstrom And Whole Foods, Whether They Like It Or Not

It is a freakishly hot May afternoon when Cameron Winklevoss decides to quench his thirst with a tall cold-brewed coffee from Starbucks, and “just a little bit of cream, to round it off,” as he says. The temperature has shot up 20 degrees since the day before and is 20 degrees hotter than it will be the day after, too. With his twin brother, Tyler, and a small entourage in tow, the 6-foot-5 Cameron abruptly stands up from a proportionately giant boardroom table at the swanky New York offices of Gemini, the brothers’ cryptocurrency exchange, and makes for the glass door in the glass wall that encloses the immaculately shiny room. During a brisk two-minute walk through the hip Gramercy Park neighborhood, Cameron passes two gyms before entering a Starbucks on the corner of Park Avenue South and 23rd Street, in the same building as the IMG modeling agency that represents Wonder Woman actress Gal Gadot and the SPIN Ping-Pong lounge owned by actress Susan Sarandon. Moving quickly past the chilled glass case holding cookie dough cake pops dipped in melted milk chocolate and doughnut cake pops in strawberry frosting topped with giant rainbow sprinkles, he approaches a counter where an infrared Honeywell scanner sits sandwiched between bunches of ripe bananas and Starbucks-branded sugar-free chewing gum. As the song “Work” by Rhianna blares through the coffee shop’s speakers, Cameron orders the small cold-brew coffee he’d been craving and takes out his phone. He brings up the beta version of a new app called Spedn, built by little-known payments startup Flexa and waives a QR code in front of the Honeywell scanner, paying for the drink with a cryptocurrency he and his brother invented that’s powered by the ethereum blockchain.