This old-school browser wants to speed up crypto purchases

By Frank Cardona

Buying cryptocurrency isn’t the easiest thing in the world. It can often take investors several hours to do so. Opera wants to speed things up.

The Norwegian company behind one of the earliest Internet browsers today announced a partnership with Wyre that will allow US users to buy Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) in “less than 30 seconds.” (It’s the same way MyEtherWallet plans to expedite ETH purchases, which it announced last week.)

Opera said users on its Android browser will be able to purchase crypto with their debit cards, while iOS users can do so with Apple Pay. In addition to the US, the company said Scandinavia will also have access to the new crypto purchasing feature. 

But Opera isn’t new to the world of crypto. “We have been working on crypto integration since 2018 when we introduced our first Web 3-ready browser for Android,” an Opera spokesperson told Decrypt. The company later launched crypto integrations for its iOS browsers the following year.

Opera also relaunched its desktop browser last year with Web 3.0 integration, allowing users to browse the decentralized web and use dapps. “Our vision is to enable and facilitate the seamless use of blockchain technologies on the web,” the spokesperson said. 

Despite being one of the earliest companies to launch an internet browser in the 1990’s, Opera’s current browser market share (1.92%) is dwarfed by giants like Google’s Chrome (64.5%) and Apple’s Safari (17.5%), according to Statcounter, a website that tracks the industry. 

The company, which says it now boasts 350 million users worldwide, faces steep competition in crypto from privacy-focused browser Brave. The Google Chromium fork recently announced a partnership that will allow users to use crypto rewards in the form of its native BAT token to purchase goods from 250,000 major brands. 

Google Chrome might not be dethroned anytime soon, but the crypto browser wars are heating up. 

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