It’s that time of the year. It’s the holiday season. And even the fact that we write this article on December 22nd 2021, a few days before the biggest gifting day of the year, you can tell we needed to send some last minute gifts. But sending gifts denominated in USD when inflation is soaring just felt…wrong. So we decided to send our friends a crypto gift in the form of Bitcoin using Coinbase. If you’ve been wondering where and how to send a crypto gift card or buy a gift card with crypto, check out this tutorial for sending crypto gift using Coinbase.
In order to send a crypto gift, there are three things you need to select:
- E-mail Address of the Recipient: One thing to note here is whichever email address you use for the recipient is the address they’ll need to use to create a Coinbase account. If they already have a Coinbase account using a different email address, they will have to undergo an extra step of transferring your gift to their personal Coinbase account. Fortunately, there should not be any fees to transfer the gift as it will all be within the Coinbase ecosystem.
- Personalized Note: While this is optional, no gift is complete with a personal touch! There did not appear to be a text limit (which is nice!). However one thing which we did find lacking was that there was no “open notifications” for when the recipient opens their gift and reads your message. Hopefully Coinbase will take this feedback into consideration and add “open notifications” in the future.
- Choose which cryptocurrency you’d like to send: Another great thing about sending crypto gifts with Coinbase is that you’re not limited to just Bitcoin or Ethereum, you can gift any cryptocurrency which Coinbase offers on their platform. This gives you lots of options!
- Choose a Design!: Coinbase is embracing the NFT space with adding the ability to design your gift card with some of the most popular NFT projects such as Bored Ape Yacht Club, Magdiel Lopez, Rob Flowers, and more.
After you’ve gone ahead and sent the gift card, your recipient will receive an email with instructions on how to access their crypto gift card! The gift is fast and instant, and you are not charged any fees for sending a crypto gift cards regardless of the amount. In our example, we sent $100 of Bitcoin to our friend. It is transacted at the most current price of Bitcoin when you complete the transaction. So depending on when your recipient opens their crypto gift card, the value of their cryptocurrency could be lower or higher than the amount which you originally sent.
Sending a crypto gift card is much easier than you might have thought. Buying a gift card with cryptocurrency is just as easy as using USD. And the experience of receiving crypto as a gift card these days is exciting, especially for people who are newer to crypto and web3. Coinbase has made it extremely easy to send a crypto gift card in minutes with no fees (at least none that we are aware of at the time of this writing). We recommend if you want to send a crypto gift card today, try sending it with Coinbase. It’s fast, fun, and cooler than sending USD 🙂
