Wi-Fi Access Point That Accepts Crypto, A New Business Idea of Coinbase CEO

By Kapil Gauhar

The CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, gives a new business idea to the market. The idea is of a Wi-Fi access point that accepts cryptocurrency.

This idea has fired a few questions to the cryptocurrency exchange –

Is Coinbase not profiting that they need to differentiate their business? Are my assets safe in Coinbase?

Before giving a thought of way too far, the business idea is actually a series of tweets that Coinbase CEO, Brian Armstrong uttered on his Twitter account.

He began with a question if anyone has tried creating a Wi-Fi access point which accepts cryptocurrency.

He Tweeted, “Plug it in and it makes you money.”

After that, Armstrong elaborated his idea by stating his fact that a lot of apartments or dense housing are within the range of several access points. And, they are all password protected, however, each may only have 1% utilization amid the week.

He said that in case someone is “tenacious enough” to deal with a bunch of small details, like the tricky integration with numerous low level firmware of OS stuff and create a paywall for all protocol would be most likely to create a value worth using and paying for.

The responses on the tweets differ. Some of them are relevant and some are not.

“Slow down, Brian. Why don’t we try to get BTC accepted at Starbucks first?”, @XRP_News responded.

A developer said –

“This is pretty easy (can build it in a day, WiFi, captive portal, wait for XRP/ILP payment to unlock internet). However, I’m seeing a trend where captive portals are being used less and less: more free and open WiFi. Or is it just me?”

Whereas, the others are referring to the projects that they claim to be doing the thing like this or at least have a similar concept, like Althea, Substratum, OpenGarden, or Helium.