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The city of Chandler, Arizona will accept a method of paying electricity and water bills in Bitcoin, Ether and Litecoin through PayPal.
Residents of Chandler, a Phoenix suburb, can now pay in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin (LTC) held in their PayPal (PYPL) accounts. However, the city will never touch that amount of digital currency; According to a press release, invoice cloud's utility payment processor will sell all of those coins for dollars.
City Council member Mark Stewart said it's important to provide residents with the latest technology, such as cryptocurrency payments. However, it remains unclear whether any of the city's 250,000 people have started using the option.
Chandler is not the first city in the United States to incorporate the use of cryptocurrencies for utility payments. In November 2021, Mercedes and Texas voted to conduct research on the topic months after Williston, North Dakota put its service online. Both are about a tenth the size of Chandler, which has a population of nearly 273,000.
Chandler's acceptance of PayPal means that bill payers won't be able to send their own coin numbers but must use intermediaries through PayPal. This creates a closed loop that prevents digital assets from entering or exiting the system.
