Steak n Shake celebrating 5 months of accepting Bitcoin payments.
While much is made about price action or regulatory developments, it's also important to remember crypto has real use cases like paying for burgers and fries.
As crypto adoption grows, more businesses are accepting digital asset payments and coin telegraph research shows that these include Star.
Subway, Burger King, Chipotle, and Baskin Robbins.
And if you live in California, maybe you can use some long lost crypto on your pumpkin spice latte.
The Golden State enacted a law so original owners reserve the right to their inactive crypto.
Well, joining me on this Friday morning is Gareth Jenkinson, head of multimedia for Coin Telegraph.
Gareth.
Good morning.
Happy Friday.
Thank you so much for joining us.
So Coin Telegraph put out a story on crypto payments.
Our viewers watching from the airport right now and perhaps business lounges, and they may be interested in hearing their crypto is increasingly being used for airline ticket bookings or hotel reservations.
So tell us where crypto payments are accepted this year.
Oh man, uh, the list is, is long and wide, Remy.
Uh, firstly, thanks for having me again.
It's always good to chat to you guys.
Um, I mean, if you're looking to buy coffee, you can do it at Starbucks and sheets, um.
Uh, if you're using certain cryptocurrency cards, you can use them anywhere really.
Um, you know, there's a, there's a multitude of really great cryptocurrency, uh, payments, uh, apps that you can use to, uh, tap and go at loads of retailers.
Uh, I'll be honest with you, uh, a real favorite of mine, uh, as you guys know, I'm a big, uh, Bitcoin maxi is of course, you know, payments, um, at stake.
Shake these Bitcoin payments which they rolled out in May of 2025, uh, around the time that Bitcoin Las Vegas happened.
And that was pretty big news, um, very, very well received obviously by the, the broader, um, uh, Bitcoin community in general.
But you can really do this like, uh, across a multitude of different places.
I think if you're looking to travel, um, traveler or Trevala, depending on how you pronounce it.
Uh, the, the very well known, uh, you know, um, traveling website allows you to pay with Bitcoin and a number of other cryptocurrencies as well.
So we're really seeing, um, a lot of movement towards people accepting and using cryptocurrency for general payments, which is the future we all wanted to see.
And, uh, amazingly, uh, we are already living in that future.
Um, if your viewers out there are interested in reading more about this, you can find this story on the Coin Telegraph website.
It's a great little feature on how you can make your crypto work for you and buy a cup of coffee.
Yeah, and Gareth, speaking of that Bitcoin conference, it's hard to believe that that happened so many months ago.
So I don't know if you had the opportunity to check out that steak n Shake cow dance that was taking place in that conference.
But nonetheless, crypto investors may be weary to hear California can take custody of inactive digital assets on centralized exchanges and traders retain full rights to reclaim their crypto under a new California law.
So tell us what's going on here.
Yeah, so I mean the, the TLDR for your viewers out there is that, uh, California has passed a bill that will allow them to seize um idle cryptocurrency uh on uh exchanges.
So basically, if you hadn't used, um, or accessed your cryptocurrency account for more than 2 years, and then there's a certain amount of uh actions that, that would fall within this category, the state, um, reserves the. to seize those assets.
Um, there's many states in this, uh, the US that do this.
There's there's 10 that have laws for unclaimed, uh, cryptocurrency that are on, uh, you know, custodial exchanges, and most of these states would automatically seize those assets and then liquidate them.
But California's rule is slightly different, this new law that has been passed, and that would require the Californian uh.
To not sell those assets or liquidate them for for dollars.
Um, it would require them, say, to hold some Bitcoin if they had seized that from an inactive account.
So if you realize that the state has taken your Bitcoin from an inactive wallet, um, there's a good chance that you can go back to them and say, hey, that belongs to me, yes, my account was inactive, um, I want my Bitcoin back and they should give you.
Bitcoin back.
This is a lot better than uh say only getting the dollars back if you went and made this kind of a claim, uh, because you would have lost the Satoshi's or the Bitcoin that they sold and the relative dollar amount would only allow you to acquire a lot less Satoshi's in all likelihood.
If you hadn't, if you bought that Bitcoin two years ago, uh, it would be drastically more valuable and therefore the purchasing power of those dollars today would just get you less.
Bitcoin.
So, um, it's a bit of a a weird catch-22 type story where it's bad news, but good news at the same time and uh I would hope to see more states in the US adopt a similar approach and not actually liquidate those cryptocurrency holdings if they seize those assets, but hold them um until such a time that that user or person goes back to claim those assets.
So that's really the the long and short of that story.
Yeah, and Gareth, you mentioned a keyword and that is liquidate.
So I do want to take a look at cryptoma's Bitcoin as well as ET.
So last Friday we saw that massive sell-off, the worst liquidation event in crypto history, and in New York Morning Trade we are looking at Bitcoin holding 105 as well as ET, which is down below that 4000 level this morning.
So what is going on here and what did you make of that sell off?
Yeah, look, the sell-off last last week I think has been spoken about at length.
Um, you know, this, this really came down to, uh, a lot of, uh, complicated, um, technological issues between, you know, automated market makers, exchanges, um, you know, perpetual dexes, and, uh, essentially loads of Cascading liquidations that um you know, cause havoc on the markets.
We saw $19 billion in liquidations, the worst ever.
Um, surprisingly, the markets bounced back pretty well the rest of the week until today.
Um, we're looking at $230 billion being wiped off the total cryptocurrency, uh, market cap in the last 24 hours, so.
So a lot of red across the markets today.
Uh, our team is still looking into the major causes of this.
Um, but yeah, it's been a, it's been a pretty brutal two weeks for the cryptocurrency space in general and, uh, very much not what people were expecting, you know, uh, they call it October.
In the cryptocurrency space because the markets are usually pretty green and and pretty buoyant in October.
Uh, that's not the case right now, midway through the month.
Um, so we'll have to wait and see what happens in the next week or so, but you know, a lot of red.
I mean, all the majors down at least 5% overnight, so.
Uh, yeah, looking at the trading today will be very interesting to see Bitcoin ETF inflows, uh, how the, how the price holds up, but we're, we're getting closer and closer to that $100,000 mark for Bitcoin, which it hasn't dropped below, uh, for a significant amount of time.
Well Gareth, we will keep a close eye on those data points as well as those price levels, so we will have to leave it there.
Thank you so much for joining us and have a great weekend.
Thank you.
