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Cash App Just Made It Easier to Give Bitcoin and Stocks as Gifts
By Julia Glum MONEY RESEARCH COLLECTIVE
You don’t even have to own stocks or Bitcoin to do it.
Are your stocking stuffers lost in the mail? Supply chain crisis threatening your White Elephant? Need a last-minute present for your cousin’s crypto-crazed boyfriend, who you didn’t know was coming to the family Christmas but of course he is?
Cash App’s got a solution.
The mobile payment app announced Tuesday that you can now send stocks and Bitcoin to other users in U.S. And you don’t even have to have stocks or Bitcoin to do it.
That’s because with Cash App‘s new gifting option, you’re actually sending the fiat, or dollar, value of stock or Bitcoin from your balance or linked debit card to another person. The recipient gets the current market value of the asset — and if they don’t want the gift in the form of fractional stocks or Bitcoin, they can select to keep it in U.S. dollars.
Available stocks include Tesla, Apple, Amazon and Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook). There’s no transaction fee.
Gifting cryptocurrency is one of this year’s hottest holiday trends (in fact, Money wrote an entire guide on it). But despite the desire to give crypto as a present — as one in 10 respondents to a BlockFi survey said they planned — there’s a lot of confusion around how to actually get it done. (Even Protocol recently declared “it’s still too hard to give crypto this holiday.”)
Cash App is one fix, though users are limited to only giving Bitcoin. Gift cards may be a better option if you’re looking to send a loved one a different cryptocurrency. Similar to how the Cash App feature works, companies like CryptoVoucher allow you to add USD to a gift card that can later be redeemed for Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple and such.
Just make sure you’re forking over less than $15,000, or you’ll face gift taxes.
More from Money:
How to Gift Cryptocurrency Ahead of the Holidays
Watch Out: 2021 Could Be the Worst Year Ever for Gift Card Scams
Julia Glum writes Dollar Scholar, a weekly newsletter that teaches millennials how to navigate the messy world of personal finance. As a reporter, Julia specializes in stories that involve or affect young people; she also assists with Money's annual Best Colleges rankings. Prior to joining Money in 2018, she was a reporter at Newsweek. She graduated from the University of Florida's Journalism school.