All Spar Supermarkets in Switzerland Will Soon Accept Bitcoin

Up to now, Swiss residents often cross the border to Germany to do their grocery shopping. However, this trend might soon reverse. Germans living near the border can now pay with Bitcoin, Monero, and other cryptocurrencies in the first Spar supermarkets.

Over the weekend, the Swiss Bitcoin Conference took place in Kreuzlingen on Lake Constance. Aside from numerous speakers and presentations – some of whom and which are familiar from other German-language conferences – the event offered a particularly exciting piece of news:

The Spar store in Kreuzlingen now accepts Bitcoin! After Zug, Kreuzlingen is now the second city in Switzerland where you can pay with Bitcoin at a Spar supermarket. According to Rahim Taghizadegan, who was on site, Bitcoin payments will soon be enabled in all Spar stores across Switzerland following pilot programs in Zug and Kreuzlingen.

After 16 years of Bitcoin, the time has come: you can now pay at a supermarket with the greatest currency of all time; it’s possible to live on Bitcoin alone, without first needing to exchange your coins for a prepaid debit card balance.

And you’re not limited to paying with Bitcoin. There are also reports of payments with Monero; a photo from the checkout at Spar shows that Ethereum, USDC, USDT, and other coins are accepted as well.

The payment processor handling these transactions is Open Crypto Pay from the Swiss crypto broker DFX. Open Crypto Pay is an „open, license-free standard for P2P (peer-to-peer) crypto payments on all blockchains and with all crypto assets;“ it provides merchants with an API interface to DFX, allowing them to integrate crypto payments into their point-of-sale systems. This means every crypto asset supported by DFX is potentially in play.

On its website, Open Crypto Pay lists the wallets compatible with the service. In addition to a wide range of Bitcoin wallets, it also mentions Cake Wallet, which supports Bitcoin, Monero, and an almost unmanageable number of cryptocurrencies (including Ethereum, Solana, Tron, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Polygon, and more), while Metamask—which supports any Ethereum token—is still listed with the note „Coming Soon.“

You can pay not only with on-chain Bitcoin, but also via the Lightning Network using LNURL (Lightning Network URL). According to a video, payment works quite smoothly by scanning a QR code printed at the checkout. However, another report mentioned that the implementation still needs „some improvement,“ as it seems you might currently need two phones to scan the payment code from one to the other. Which account is true can’t be determined without a test.

Screenshot from the video by Jens Leinert

But if everything continues to work as reported, Spar will become the first supermarket chain to accept Bitcoin across the board. This could become the long-overdue prototype proving that it works—and possibly mark the launch of the equally long-awaited mass adoption of Bitcoin in retail.