The merchandise store of the world’s most popular game, Fortnite, will now accept cryptocurrency as a form of payment — though only Monero (XMR).
Fortnite, a battle-royale style shooting game made by Epic Games, and with a player base of approximately 200 million players, will let users purchase such items as shirts and other clothing in their online store.
Officials of Fornite are yet to make the announcement themselves, but fans have posted the news on reddit, where it was very happily welcomed.
Monero project lead Riccardo Spagni shared his joy on Twitter:
Too cool: the Fortnite merch store (https://t.co/KNL4IFCFHk) lets you pay in Monero, so now you can purchase that sweet Durrr Burger onesie without your friends / family / coworkers judging you. https://t.co/XYs1NjGvGp
— Riccardo Spagni (@fluffypony) January 1, 2019
The addition of Monero as a payment option will give the cryptocurrency a great deal of exposure — and many of the players are users in their teens or early 20s, who have been known to have a particular affinity towards cryptocurrency as a form of money and an investment option.
Interestingly, Fortnite chose Monero over Bitcoin as they believed the latter would be accompanied by privacy issues.
The store providers wished to offer users a privacy-preserving alternate. However, Spagni elaborated that Fortnite is interested in Bitcoin’s Lightning Network upgrade.
The store provider is very interested in LN, and we’re pushing hard to get them to add that to the list. Right now they’ve only enabled Monero, even though they have a number of options (including bech32-enabled Bitcoin).
— Riccardo Spagni (@fluffypony) January 1, 2019
Monero-based purchases are unlikely to see much traction, at least in the near future, given that the ability to purchase and use cryptocurrency still remains out of reach for the majority of the masses.
Still, with greater adoption in the coming months, measuring the growth of cryptocurrency as a payment option will be an interesting experiment.
Monero Gaining Increased Exposure and Growing as a Payment Option
On reddit, Spagni described the development as a part of the Project Coral Reef effort, funded by both the Monero community and GloBee, a cryptocurrency payment partner associated with the project.
Project Coral Reef is an effort by Monero to increase the viability of Monero in everyday transactions. Several music artists and bands, as well as some stores, have already become associated with the effort.
Being featured in on the world’s hottest game is no small marketing achievement for the Monero project and GloBee.
Regardless of whether or not any significant portion of revenue will be received through Monero, the simple fact of spreading into a mainstream phenomenon brings it an immeasurable amount of value.
