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The CrossFit community members can now have another payment method for their favorite gear. The Swedish fitness apparel brand Northern Spirit has made an announcement that it now accepts cryptos for payments. This includes Bitcoin, Bitcoin Dash, Dogecoin, Etheruem, Litecoin, Dai, and USDC and all these tokens will be accepted forms of payment both at the Northern Spirit store and online.

Cryptocurrencies soared in popularity in 2021. However, the concept is not new and was actually introduced (in another form) in the early 1980s. However, when the pseudonym developer Satoshi Nakamoto introduced Bitcoin’s whitepaper, the technology appeared to be totally different and equilibrated in some sort. 

Northern Spirit has seen exponential growth since its launch in 2013 in Sweden. Co-founder Niklas Carlson and Joakim Loveng added a webshop in 2014, and in only a few years the company was one of the largest in Europe — most notably at the French Throwdown in 2016.

Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile, however. Although several major companies started accepting digital tokens as a form of payment, many of these have halted the process. For instance, the world’s richest person Elon Musk announced last year, that his company Tesla will start accepting Bitcoin as a payment method. Nonetheless, it didn’t take a few days before the billionaire revoked the decision citing concerns about the environment.

The mining of Bitcoin and several other cryptos that rely on the proof-of-work model are power intensive. The mining revolves around computers solving complex mathematical equations and after each mining rig or computer solves a puzzle, a block is created in the blockchain. Afterward, when transactions happen, the information are stored in these blocks that were created from the mining process. 

Nonetheless, in recent years, new models appeared in the cryptocurrency space such as the proof-of-stake model which is less power-intensive, and that could lead to a wider adoption from people who were concerned about the negative impact on the environment.