Chinese gamers take Bitcoin as a cross-border payment to buy steam’s gift card.

Steam is a video game digital distribution platform providing automatic updates for users’ games. And gift card is a kind of recharge card for users in steam platform. Chinese gamers prefer to buy gift cards for the third party for 85% to 93% discount.

Some E-commerce platforms even sell gift cards with 68% discount in China. So how those E-commerce platforms get gift cards at such a low price? The reason is that they practice gift card arbitrage by Bitcoin OTC trade on Paxful.

Paxful is a global OTC Bitcoin trading platform. Unlike other OTC trading platform, Paxful supports not only conventional online payment and TT, but also gift cards and shopping cards for Bitcoin exchange—steam’s gift card is no exception.

“I can’t tell you the specific quantity, but I achieve thousands of orders a week. OTC trade of steam’s gift card on Paxful has increased sharply this year. Paxful is becoming popular among Chinese players. Friends around me also buy gift cards on it.”

It is closely related to the improvement of Chinese bitcoin awareness and bitcoin’s surging price. Each merchant bidding in Paxful needs not only 0.1 bitcoin deposit, but also a bitcoin reserve to receive gift cards.

Following is the gift card arbitrage by bitcoin OTC trade:

First-hand dealers get cheap gift cards through various “internal channels” and quickly transfer profits into Bitcoin on Paxful. Second-hand dealers deposit Bitcoins in Paxful and receive gift cards at 62-66% discount, then sell them on a third-party platform at 68% discount bill. In theory, each gift card can be arbitraged about 2% without risk.

The recognition of Bitcoin in China is increasing, covering geeks, financiers, game merchants and other groups. In the field of online game recharging, bitcoin’s function of cross-border payment is very convenient.