The partnership between Coinbase and London-based startup WeGift means that Coinbase customers in the EU and Australia can now make a direct withdrawal from their crypto balances onto e-gift cards, with no Coinbase withdrawal fees.
This coming just months after Coinbase secured an e-money license from the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority.
Coindesk reported that, in 2013, Coinbase did something similar by partnering with a New York-based eGifter to offer “crypto gift cards.”
In a post on the Coinbase support site, the company suggests that users look to eGifter or Gyft, another such service, to purchase gift cards.
Earlier, eGifter had stunned users by requiring that they have a Coinbase account to use the service. At the same time, Gyft mandated that payments be made through Coinbase or BitPay. This was met with backlash and the eGifter requirement was removed in March 2017.
According to the blog post on the WeGift partnership, users can cash in their virtual coin for e-gift cards from companies like Nike, Tesco, Uber, Google Play, Ticketmaster, and Zalando.
This service is currently available to those in the UK, Spain, France, Italy, Netherlands and Australia.
According to TechCrunch, a bulk of the e-gift card retailers are restricted to customers in the UK.
