At Great Lakes Science Center, cryptocurrency will now be an accepted form of payment. The museum announced that it will begin accepting bitcoin transactions on Tuesday, Nov. 13, reportedly making it among just a few museums in the country to do so. The box office will use BitPay to process the transactions.
According to the website SpendBitcoins.com, two American museums known to accept the cryptocurrency today are Museum of the Coastal Bend in Texas and St. Petersburg Museum of History in Florida.
The Great Lakes museum will begin accepting bitcoin ahead of the Blockland Solutions Conference, which clearly inspired it. That inaugural four-day event takes place in December; admission can be paid there in bitcoin as well.
“There is a lot of excitement around the conference,” said Great Lakes Science Center president and CEO Kirsten Ellenbogen in a statement. “Accepting bitcoin is just a small part of the momentum to grow a blockchain ecosystem in Cleveland.”
For Ellenbogen, it also underscores the museum’s own innovative efforts as it supports the disciplines of science, technology, engineering and math.
“Last year we launched our mobile app that uses augmented and virtual reality to allow guests to experiment with flames in space and test spacecraft designs re-entering Earth’s atmosphere when they visit the NASA Glenn Visitor Center, and now they’ll be able to use their phone to pay for their admission using Bitcoin,” she said,
Some other local companies involved with cryptocurrency Crain’s has covered recently include accounting firm Skoda Minotti, which started accepting bitcoin in September, and Ethode sister company LightSpeed Hosting, which runs a massive cryptocurrency mining facility in Medina County.