Paying with NIM in a shop

Last week Max and I went to Vienna with one goal: to try out the Salamantex payment terminals and finally pay with NIM in a physical shop. So we went. 

First, we booked two rooms in the Hotel Vienna, also known as the Kryptohotel. Can we pay for the entire stay with NIM? The hotel owner Mr. Lerch replied: Yes, we can! So we packed up: business cards, Nimiq swag, recording gear and left for Vienna.

First payment experience

To prepare for our work, Max and I met in the bar of the hotel and had a cup of coffee. That’s how we met the hotel owner for the first time and we asked: can we also pay for the coffee in NIM?? Sure! So we got our gear, set up microphone and camera and were ready to pay with NIM in a physical shop for the first time EVER! We got excited. :)

And it worked! The hotel owner entered the amount to be paid, the terminal showed a QR code, Max scanned it, confirmed the transaction on his mobile and seconds later, a printed receipt appeared from the little machine. Payment successful!

We were super happy! It’s an incredible and hard-to-explain feeling to see years of hard work finally coming to fruition: we paid with NIM as conveniently as if it was a credit card payment.

Nimiq pizza day

Hyped with this great experience, we went to a cafe and a pharmacy in town. 

Cafe 42 was our next stop. The owner was equally curious about crypto, so we talked about Nimiq, our ambitions, the vision, and future goals. The owner being such a crypto enthusiast, we were all excited to pay in NIM for the delicious pizza, salad, and soup we got. That made it the first Nimiq Pizza Day in history, but not by manually exchanging NIM for a pizza, but by actually paying directly with NIM in the shop!

Maybe it will become a costly pizza in the future, but it was well worth it. Back to topic. While the hotel owner had a payment terminal custom-made by Salamantex, the small restaurant owner was using thegeneric Ingenico payment terminal— typically used for credit card payments. He was happy to walk us through the entire process, and we happily recorded everything.Ingenico terminalsare especially interesting becausethousands of them are in use alreadyand the Salamantex software can be added to make them crypto-enabled without the shop owner needing to buy and learn a new device. That means, step by step, Salamantex will roll out the software plugin on the Ingenico payment terminalsfirst in,Austria, then Germany, and then throughout Europe!There is no definite deadline, but the process started with the rollout in Austria.

Moving on, we went to the pharmacy Troststraße U1 owned by a crypto enthusiast that was happy to have us come and buy something trying out the Salamantex terminal. Also, that went smoothly, and we got three organic bamboo toothbrushes that we want to give to you. If you want to win a bamboo toothbrush together with an original Nimiq-branded Ledger Nano S, follow @Nimiq on Twitter and share this blog post using the hashtag #NIMonSALAMANTEX. We’ll pick three lucky winners.

Pay with NIM and join the raffle

I’ve been looking forward to paying with NIM in shops for a long time and now it finally happened! And I didn’t expect the experience to be so mind-blowing — I think there’s no better way to explain it than with this photo of Max being happy.

The crypto revolution is arriving, we’re writing history! Thank you for being on this journey, the sky's the limit! Join the revolution, pay with NIM in Austria and post your bill on Twitter for a chance to get your purchase paid by Nimiq.

Pura Vida, 

Sven and Max