KFC Venezuela Not Accepting Crypto Payments

Antonio Sampayo, the Chief Executive Officer of KFC Venezuela has stated that the recent announcement that their restaurants would start accepting the cryptocurrency Dash as a payment option is false.

Sampayo stated that while their company had discussed a possible payment test with Dash, nothing had been finalized. He also categorically stated that using Dash for processing payments was not a fact and that the publication of such news had not been authorized by KFC.

False Claims by Dash

The entire rumor started when Mark Mason, the media director of DashNews, tweeted that KFC Venezuela would be accepting Dash payments starting from the next week.

There was a video attached to Mason’s tweet that stated that Venezuela’s capital city Caracas would be the first city to pilot a cryptocurrency based payment system at one of its largest KFC outlets. The video also announced that another 24 KFC restaurants located in different parts of the country would be adopting this payment method.

The video also said that more than 2,400 merchants across the country accepted Dash as a payment method. This included restaurant chains such as Subway and Papa John’s.

This announcement was lent credence thanks to a report published recently by Forbes that the co-founder of Dash Help, Dash Text and Dash Merchant Venezuela, Alejandro Echeverria had stated that people in Venezuela were using their cryptocurrency as it gave them an easy way to complete payments.

Echeverria is also reported to have said that Dash was being used by small family run businesses but was now being adopted by larger companies too.

Added to this, the Chief Executive Officer of Dash Core Group, Ryan Taylor said in August that Venezuela was the second biggest market for their cryptocurrency, with nearly 100 merchants accepting Dash as payment every week.

Celebrating Too Early

The premature announcement by Dash has caused the company a great deal of embarrassment in the market. Dash Merchant Venezuela has now had to issue a public apology to KFC for misrepresenting facts.

The company was forced to admit that their Twitter announcement was premature. Dash also tried to justify its actions by stating that it was their optimism about a possible deal that had triggered this announcement.

The actual situation that Dash revealed in its apology is that there are ongoing discussions between the two companies and testing is being done on the possibility of using Dash as a payment method, but there is nothing concrete yet.