Bitcoin Milestone on China's Singles Day: Alibaba Supports BTC Rewards, Spotlights Taylor Swift and Smashes Sales

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Alibaba, China’s e-commerce giant, is partnering with Bitcoin rewards platform Lolli.

Lolli users can now earn up to 5% Bitcoin back when shopping for items online with Alibaba.

Says CEO and co-founder of Lolli, Alex Adelman,

“This is a milestone partnership for Lolli as Alibaba is the largest retailer and e-commerce company in the world, launching on Single’s Day, the world’s largest shopping day of the year.

Our partnership allows our users to earn free bitcoin on millions of products online every day. Arguably the most important piece of this partnership is that it supports our mission of connecting the entire world through commerce.”

Alibaba just smashed a new sales record. Singles Day is the world’s largest 24-hour shopping event and Alibaba moved a whopping $38.4 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV), a metric that tabulates sales across the company’s shopping platforms. Last year the figure stood at nearly $30.5 billion.

Also known as the Double 11 shopping festival because it falls on November 11, the 24-hour event promotes huge discounts across Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms such as Tmall. Sales outperformed both Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the US. Alizila reports that in just 18 hours and 31 minutes, the number of delivery orders exceeded $1.042 billion, surpassing the total number of delivery orders during last year’s event on November 11, 2018.

In comparison, data tracker Adobe Analytics predicts that retailers in the US will generate $29 billion in sales this year from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday.

Headliner Taylor Swift kicked off Alibaba’s Singles Day with a glitzy show on November 10 at the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai, performing three songs from her hit album “Lover”.

The extravaganza was in line with the tech giant’s booming sales and its digital cloud-based infrastructure.

Reports Alizila,

“Speaking at the Media Center at the company’s Hangzhou headquarters, Alibaba Chief Technology Officer Jeff Zhang described 11.11 as an airplane flying at turbo speed, only this year it has a brand new engine: having moved its core systems onto the cloud, significantly boosting the computing performance underpinning the shopping festival.”