Equinox Health Club Says “Yes” to Crypto Payments

If you’re a crypto fan and you fancy bringing your heart rate up on the treadmill or bench pressing and pumping iron, you may want to give Equinox a try. As a luxury fitness center in New York, the company recently announced it’s going to permit crypto payments for gym memberships and merchandise.

Equinox Is Allowing Crypto Payments for Memberships

The move is pushing the goals of bitcoin and its digital counterparts closer to being achieved. What many people likely forget is that while bitcoin and many of its crypto cousins have taken on either speculative or even hedge-like statuses in recent years, many of them were initially designed to serve as payment tools. They were built to push checks, credit cards, and fiat currencies to the side, but this has been a relatively slow journey given the volatility that continues to drag them down.

It is extremely hard to understand when bitcoin and its crypto family will go up or down when it comes to their prices. Many stores and companies have been reluctant to say “yes” when it comes to accepting crypto payments for this reason, and to a degree, we can’t blame them.

Consider the following scenario: someone walks into a store and buys $50 worth of merchandise with bitcoin. For one reason or another, the store doesn’t trade the BTC into fiat right away and about 24 hours go by. From there, the price of BTC goes down and that $50 becomes $40. The customer gets to keep everything he or she bought, but the store has lost money in the end. Is this a fair situation? Not everyone thinks so.

That’s what makes enterprises like Equinox so important. They understand the initial purposes of bitcoin and digital currencies and are trying to transform them into usable tools that everyday people can benefit from.

Equinox is now the first health club in the Big Apple to permit bitcoin and crypto payments. The company has been accepting said payments since early May, and the company announced in a statement that it’s looking to attract customers that are both “physically and digitally” fit.

Getting Back to the Way Things Were

To process future payments, the firm has partnered with digital currency payment enterprise Bit Pay, which is known for processing transactions for businesses centered around bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and several other digital assets.

Equinox and many other gyms throughout America suffered heavily during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 and 2021. Equinox is apparently in a rather large state of recovery, having recorded a sales jump of roughly 122 percent in quarter one of this year. This is more than double the 60.9 percent jump it experienced during the same period in 2019. Apparently, everyone is eager to mingle on the yoga mat again and return to normal life.