"We added ApeCoin and Euro Coin because customers of our luxury merchant partners asked for it. They asked, and we delivered," BitPay's CEO says.
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Gucci is about to start accepting ApeCoin.
The high-end fashion brand announced plans to start accepting crypto as a payment method back in May.
A small handful of U.S. stores — in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Atlanta and Las Vegas — were reportedly going to be among the first to take the plunge.
However, the designer retailer had ambitions to embrace digital assets across America by the end of this summer.
A particularly headline-grabbing part of that announcement revealed that Shiba Inu and Dogecoin would be accepted along with Bitcoin and Ether.
In a new press release, BitPay said Gucci would become the first retailer to accept APE — with support for Euro Coin, the sister stablecoin to USDC, also in the pipeline.
Now, 70% of Gucci's directly operated stores in America accept payment in 10 different cryptocurrencies, with remaining shops set to be ready by the first week of August.
BitPay's CEO Stephen Pair said:
"We added ApeCoin and Euro Coin because customers of our luxury merchant partners asked for it. They asked, and we delivered."
APE is an ERC-20 governance token used in the the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection ecosystem.
