Leading U.S. movie theater chain AMC has added two meme-inspired cryptocurrencies, Shiba Inu ($SHIB) and Dogecoin ($DOGE) as payment methods, a week before they were scheduled to go live.
The move was announced by AMC’s CEO Adam Aron, who in a tweet shared with his over 240,000 followers detailed the movie theater chain was now accepting both DOGE and SHIB for online payments. The CEO thanks crypto payments processor BitPay for its support.
The company was planning on adding the meme-inspired cryptocurrencies as a payment method by March 19, but the move came ahead of schedule. As CryptoGlobe reported, AMC added bitcoin payments for movie tickets and concessions last year, and at the time said it was exploring “how else AMC can participate in this burgeoning cryptocurrency universe.”
The company first decided to add DOGE payments after Aaron published a poll on Twitter that saw 140,000 people vote on it, and 68.1% say it should “for sure” list DOGE.
The addition of Shiba Inu was decided after Aron published a second Twitter poll asking his followers whether the DOGE rival should also be accepted. 81.4% of the 153,000 people who responded noted SHIB should “for sure” be added as a payment method.
BitPay has notably also recently helped Australian energy firm 1st Energy start accepting cryptocurrency payments, including in both meme-inspired tokens DOGE and SHIB. BitPay was established back in 2011 and added SHIB support last year.
These development come shortly after leading digital payments platform Wirex, which has over 4.5 million users and allows them to spend dozens of currencies at more than 80 million locations worldwide, has also added support for SHIB.
Earlier this month the Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, Mykhailo Fedorov, has revealed that the Ukrainian government is now accepting donations in DOGE as it faces a Russian invasion.
All of these developments show that both meme-inspired cryptocurrencies have been seeing their utility explode over the last few months. As reported Mustafa Elitas, Deputy Chairman of the AK Party Group and Turkey’s Minister of Economy, is said to have met with members of the Turkish SHIB community to discuss the cryptocurrency’s adoption in the country.
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