Nimiq and Coinpay join forces to increase Crypto adoption

We are excited to announce the collaboration of Nimiq with Coinpay, a fintech company based in Costa Rica, starting off with the listing of NIM in the Coinpay product suite including their wallet, exchange and debit card available in many countries around the world. Learn more about Coinpay on their website.

Nimiq is on a mission to bring crypto to everyone, in every part of the world. The project is already in different stages of  collaborating with European fintech companies including Salamantex, TEN31 Bank and Bluecode. The time has come to start branching out and bring the full Nimiq experience to a region of the world with an enormous crypto adoption potential: Latin America.

Nimiq has strong ties in Costa Rica: The open source Nimiq Blockchain protocol was inspired in Costa Rica, and several team members are themselves from this country. As a project with one foot in Latin America, we are well aware of the barriers that users come up against when trying out crypto for the first time. There is currently no easy way to buy/sell crypto since most popular platforms do not yet support fiat conversions in the region. This prevents new users from testing out crypto payments, and new merchants from accepting it. Nimiq OASIS is naturally a solution that would solve a lot of problems in Costa Rica and Latam. However, to enable OASIS Fiat HTLC in a country, we need a fintech entity with instant settlement bank payments to implement it, such as Coinpay.

Collaborating with Coinpay

Coinpay is a Costarrican fintech company with several years of experience in crypto payments. This collaboration allows Nimiq to benefit from their ecosystem which includes:

• Connection to the Costarrican bank system for a Nimiq OASIS implementation
• Crypto debit cards available around the world
• Gift card services in over 100+ stores
• Exchange with local fiat pairs.

As a first milestone, Coinpay is supporting NIM in their Wallet and Exchange which are available not only in Latin America but in many countries including the US and countries from the EU. Separately, it enables users in Costa Rica to use Coinpay as an off-ramp from NIM to USD for up to 2'500 USD monthly. Bank withdrawal outside of Costa Rica is not supported currently, but Coinpay indeed plans to support more countries for this feature.

Going forward Coinpay  intends to work on allowing users around the world to get debit card supporting top-up with NIM, paying for their utility bills with NIM and also buy goods with gift cards in many countries. Stay tuned for upcoming announcements regarding these additional services! 

In parallel we are working with Coinpay to enable Nimiq OASIS through their banking infrastructure. When implemented it will allow people in Costa Rica to be able to buy and sell crypto from Costarrican bank accounts through the fiat atomic swap, a service as non-custodial as possible. Coinpay has plans to expand to other countries in the region, which would in turn also enable OASIS to get to new countries and more people.

Nimiq Adoption in Central America

Together with Coinpay, we want to solve one of the main barriers for adoption: easily swapping crypto to fiat. This is a big pain point for merchants: before they accept crypto they need the certainty of being able to swap it back to fiat in case they need the fiat cash flow to pay external providers.

This new feature joins our current effort of educating and onboarding merchants in the region, which also include:

• A dedicated team that visits merchants, educates them and provides technical support;
• Developing a crypto map that will list merchants that accept crypto, connecting crypto users with crypto merchants;
• Organizing frequent meetups in different parts of the country to further educate new users into the crypto economy;
• Increased marketing efforts to generate more adoption in the region.

Coinpay plans on rolling out these services in the coming months and  we are very excited about the first milestone: from now on, NIM is available in Coinpay’s exchange and wallet, with NIM to USD off-ramp supported in Costa Rica. 

This is our first collaboration, but there is a lot of potential for the future. We would like to end by thanking Coinpay for joining the Nimiq mission and believing in the overarching ethos: crypto for everyone, crypto for humans.

Pura Vida
Team Nimiq