A family tourist attraction on Bristol’s doorstep has become the first in the South West to allow visitors to pay for their tickets using cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.
Avon Valley Adventure and Wildlife Park at Keynsham now accepts Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Dai, Litecoin and USD coin having recently reopened following the easing of lockdown restrictions. 
The award-winning park is using a system called Coinbase Commerce for customer payments, which can be made in any part of the business from paying for entry to booking for one-off events.
It is also launching early bird tickets for a ‘FEAR Scream Park’ event that can only by bought with cryptocurrency.
The park, which describes itself as combining “fun and education in one”, has indoor and outdoor play areas across its 80-plus acres, including animal handling activities with Shetland ponies, pigs, goats, donkeys, rabbits, snakes, alpaca, wallabies, red and fallow deer, rare-breed cattle, sheep and more.
Other attractions include a one-and-a-half mile riverside walk, electric quad bikes, obstacle courses, go-carts, mini golf and a large indoor play barn.
Park owner Doug Douglas said: “We are really excited to be able to offer the opportunity for people to buy our tickets with cryptocurrencies.
“We always look to the future and I personally feel this is going to be a massive disruptor for the mainstream financial systems that have had it good for so long.
“I hate paying transaction fees, booking fees etc and by taking crypto we can cut out the middleman and deal directly with our guests, passing this saving onto them.
“It’s becoming much more mainstream and quite a lot of people have made investments in cryptocurrency, but there are not many opportunities to buy things like this with it. I think it’s a unique and fun thing we can offer.”
A cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, is a digital or virtual currency based on a network distributed across a large number of computers, which means they exist outside the control of governments and central authorities.
