Whole Foods, Barnes and Noble, Gamestop, Bed Bath and Beyond, Caribou Coffee, Jamba Juice, and Crate and Barrel all have something in common: they will start taking Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, and Gemini Dollars. This is possible by a revolutionary payment network called Flexa, built using cryptocurrencies, which allows mainstream consumers to spend their digital assets at brick and mortar stores across the US.

According to The Verge, consumers pay for items using Flexa's app, Spedn, which generates a QR code that consumers scan at the checkout register. Upon the scan, the merchant receives instant payment in dollars, and the equivalent amount of cryptocurrency is debited from the consumer's cryptocurrency wallet.

Flexa mentioned on its website that it believes the existing payments infrastructure, established five decades ago, is completely broken. Cash alternatives, like credit and debit cards, are insanely costly per transaction for merchants and are prone to cyber attacks.

Instead of "bolting cryptocurrency payments on top of debit cards," the payment processor company said it took a new approach: built out thousands of new connections with tens of thousands of merchant point-of-sale terminals nationwide in 2018, to bypass the existing payments infrastructure and allow cryptocurrency-based payment authorizations directly to merchants.

The new payment authorizations are called "flexcodes," and starting last week, consumers can now use Spedn at major retail stores across the country.

With the world of payments is evolving, Flexa could be part of a massive shift towards cryptocurrency point-of-sale terminals at major retailers. 

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Meanwhile, as of Sunday morning, Bitcoin was up 10%, tagging 8,137 at 6:45 am. Since the December 2018 low of 3,157, the non-fiat currency has moved up 159% in 152 days, but still well off its ATHs of 20,000 in December 2017.