Bitcoin Takes To The Skies

Emirates Airlines—the largest airline in the United Arab Emirates—will begin accepting Bitcoin payments to purchase its tickets. The airline has not yet announced when the service will be operational, but the news is extremely interesting. The company is also planning to launch NFTs and a metaverse.

Emirates Airlines announced that it could hire a task force of specialists to internally develop an App and the technologies necessary for such purpose. According to the CEO of Emirates, the company is going to be increasingly aligned with the UAE’s vision of the opportunities offered by the digital economy.

Excellent news for Bitcoin and more generally for the cryptocurrency industry. UAE is currently developing a really interesting crypto ecosystem, with projects in this world that kicked off several months ago. The challenge was therefore taken up by Emirates, which started a double crypto-themed project. On the one hand, the opening to payments in Bitcoin, and on the other the creation of NFT and metaverse for customers and employees.

Emirates Is Planning A Lot More Than Payments

From a technical standpoint, Emirates Airlines will be hiring a task force of experts to develop apps that can monitor customer needs. This effort will not only be customer-oriented but the interactive experiences in the metaverse will also be targeted at company employees.

“With the metaverse, you will be able to transform your whole processes — whether it is in operation, training, sales on the website, or complete experience — into a metaverse type application, but more importantly making it interactive,” Emirates Chief Operating Officer Adel Ahmed Al-Redha declared today. These words indicate the possibility of combining solutions from these different worlds—which may look similar but differ profoundly—as they do in this case.

Many other countries on other continents are trying to achieve similar results to the United Arab Emirates. But the very particular economic climate that is linked to the emirates is favoring a widespread adoption of these crypto ecosystems.

Crypto Is Steadily Being Accepted As Payment

From paying for luxury properties all the way up to attracting crypto-businesses due to a friendly regulatory environment, the Emirates are increasingly becoming the preferred destination for the big players in the sector. In the Dubai region, the game has just started, with Bitcoin potentially having a leading role in a revolution that will then involve a moltitude of other crypto projects. The metaverse, for example, continues to be a very attractive world for large companies.

In recent years, airports and airlines around the world have been investigating blockchain-based technology and crypto payments. In 2021, the Latvian airline airBaltic—which has been accepting BTC since 2014—started accepting Dogecoin and Ether as payment options. That same year, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele announced that the airline Volaris El Salvador will accept BTC payments. Venezuelan International Airport Simón Bolívar has also been working to enable cryptocurrency payments to comply with local industry standards. But it seems that only after such a move from a big player like Emirates Airlines other big airlines are more likely to follow the example and integrate crypto into their operations, which could result in a domino effect that would benefit the transportation sector as well as the crypto industry.