On Friday, UAE-owned airline Emirates announced that it planned to add Bitcoin as a payment method. It also announced that it would launch an NFT collection, among other web3 ventures.
At face, there’s not very much interesting about this — it’s just another company offering support for the world’s largest cryptocurrency. In fact, airlines have been doing this for years. Latvia’s airBaltic began accepting Bitcoin in 2014. And El Salvador’s airline, Volaris, announced that it would accept Bitcoin in October 2021 (that has not come to pass yet, but this makes sense given El Salvador’s positions on Bitcoin…)
However, Emirates’ decision to accept Bitcoin and embrace the world of web3 makes a lot of sense if you understand its positioning:
Emirates is, by many measures, an ultra-luxury intercontinental airline. And its leadership, Princes in their own rite, know full and well that the wealthy elites of crypto don’t want to sell their Bitcoin to fly first class — they want to pay in their preferred currency.
That might seem like an extremely obvious deduction from this offering, but given Dubai’s positioning (and the broader United Arab Emirates’ positioning) on crypto, it’s fair to assume that accepting crypto — or speculating in the world of crypto and digital currency payments — might be an acquisition strategy for a treasury.
Or, at the least, a low-barrier method to dabble in this emergent asset class and test its waters.
Alongside their plan to accept Bitcoin, Emirates also plans to spend “tens of millions of dollars” on metaverse, web3, and NFT apps.