Robocoin, maker of Bitcoin ATMs, has announced a new service called Robocoin Wallet. The service, which acts as a bitcoin wallet directly connected to the company’s public ATMs, allows you to store your BTC and send and receive cash via the Internet or directly through their service.
The wallet essentially removes the final step needed for most common bitcoin buys. At the ATM, users are usually required to have a wallet into which they can move their purchased bitcoins. This was usually done through competing services – Blockchain.info or Coinbase, for example. Now, with this homegrown solution the team has closed the loop.
In the beginning, the company saw Robocoin users struggling with wallet software.
“We saw people buy and sell for the first time and quickly understood that the solution we built was limited by dependencies – customers needed bitcoin wallets and operators needed Bitcoin exchange uptime. We had to improve that,” said CEO Jordan Kelley. “This could only be done by removing dependencies from the existing bitcoin ATM infrastructure – external wallets, blockchain parsers, exchanges, etc. Now anyone can walk up and instantly convert their cash into bitcoin; that bitcoin is ready and waiting for them in their Robocoin Wallet.”
The wallet, in other words allowed customers to have a place to put their bitcoin immediately. “Before the Robocoin Wallet, customers would buy their bitcoin with cash and either scan their existing wallet or they would generate a receipt – which prints out a paper wallet with a QR code, a public address and a private key,” said Kelley. “You can’t imagine how many people took that paper wallet, walked over to the counter of the coffee shop and tried to buy coffee with it.”
The wallets are available at Robocoin.com.
Interestingly, the company is addressing these tools to the underbanked who can deposit their cash into Robocoin ATMs for storage and then pull it out or pay with BTC as needed. Obviously the volatility of bitcoin is a slight concern for these users. Kelley disagrees.
“I would argue that Bitcoin is incredibly stable. As a platform and as a technology, the stability is incredible. There are millions of transactions happening every day and the blockchain keeps going,” he said. “We don’t focus too much on the price of bitcoin because we are still in the infancy of the infrastructure stage. There is so much activity in bitcoin, so many companies tackling huge challenges.”
“Give it time,” he said.