Chai Adda becomes Britain’s first café to accept crypto; sells vada pav, biryani

26-year-old mechanical engineer Tayyab Shafiq launched Britain’s first café that accepts cryptocurrency – Chai Ada. The café accepts payments in cash, cards and cryptocurrency. Chai Ada café has developed an app to accept payments in cryptocurrencies like Ripple, Litecoin and Dogecoin.
 
“In order to minimise gas fees and transactional fees of big coins, we are offering our clients the option to pay in Ripple, Litecoin and Dogecoin,” Shafiq tells India Today. Rana, who looks after operations at the café, explained that this will be as simple as making a quick transfer over the phone from your crypto wallet to ours.
 
According to Shafiq, digital currency is the currency of the future due to its decentralised nature. He also said that various brands and outlets will take up digital currency in the coming days. “The future is certainly about digital currency due to its decentralised nature. And I am quite sure that more than a want, it will be the need of the world. You’ll see various brands and outlets taking it in in the near future.”
 
The café operations manager Rana further underscored that people are also utilising non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which allow users to purchase their own virtual assets like digital art from the café. The café also has metaverse plans wherein people can have virtual meetings, basically like sitting in Chai Ada virtually.
 
Chai Ada serves Kashmiri pink tea, vada pav, biryani and masala chai among several other food items. The first digital currency cafe in Britain is located close to the BBC Television Centre and a famous shopping mall in London.
 
(With inputs from Loveena Tandon)

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