I had my doubts about the alternative currency market. The utility of the tokens and coins available when I got started were low and it was more of a buy and hold type scenario. you couldn't spend them in real life and very few merchants accepted them online. Even now and days it's still a frustrating task to move bitcoin quickly into fiat or vice versa as the only bitcoin ATM in my city refuses to acknowledge my identity as factual which makes the whole exercise frustrating and I have only tried once. I tried Paxful as a method but either the markup buyers and sellers wanted in trade made it a extreme loss to go that route, or the buyer or seller was simply unavailable to make the trade in a timely manner.
When I was playing around with ripple a couple year ago I think the problem was the same. I had made some head way by getting a Coinbase account which after a time allowed me to purchase bitcoins instantly and with a little help of a exchange I could convert them into ripple easy enough but turning it back to fiat was a laborious process requiring time. In steps Shift the cryptocurrency debit card! during the beta test of the card they were linking there API's to ripple accounts and allowing the members of the community to spend there tokens in stores and shops mostly in the us. Like a true Yankee my first purchase on the card was at a fast food restaurant Taco bell I believe and it worked seamlessly.
Sometime later the beta test ended and the company went quite. My life got busy and I lost some interest in ripple and alt currencies in general. Little while later I got interested again with a availability of idol time and curiosity and the issue reinserted itself into my daily concerns. I remember Shift and alt coin debit cards in general and decided to check in on how far we've gotten with the attempts via the search engine. I reconnected with Shift. The shift debit card now works with Coinbase which provides what I think is a powerful tool for participating in the alt coin market. They developed the software quite a bit improving on the phone application, and the physical card allows for you to withdraw money in exchange for your coins at many ATMs in the USA and I do believe around the world.
for now this solves my problem with alt coin utility adequately but I would like to see direct spending options for Ethereum on Coinbase instead of having to convert it into bitcoin. Check out shift for yourself and see what utility it can provide you in everyday life. Look it up on google using the search term "Shift Payment".
In tell next time!