New Venmo Feature - the Price of Instant Transfers

A group of friends and I went out for dinner. When it was time to pay I picked up the bill and had them Venmo me to avoid using several cards to split the bill and overwhelm the waitress. As far as I know this is becoming a very normal and much easier way to settle short term debts such as this.

Today I logged on to my Venmo account to initiate a withdrawal of those payments to my bank account. I was surprised to see that there is a new feature:

So Instant Transfer is a new feature that allows Venmo users to transfer their Venmo balance to their eligible Visa and Mastercard debit card, typically within 30 minutes.

Perhaps its just me, however, I could not help but draw parallels to sending a cryptocurrency for a network fee. I had recently sent some Litecoin on Coinbase to a friend which cost 0.000226LTC (about $0.03) for me to send. The LTC was received in 15 minutes.

Of course the alternative to Venmo will be Zelle which potentially will grow as people learn how to use it but for now I think it is safe to say the leader in P2P mobile payments is Venmo and they have declared the price of instant transfers is a gumball. I would hope that the best cryptocurrencies can stay under that 25 cent mark.

My only question is, when will LitePay be available and if it is as easy to use as Venmo currently is… will I ever use Venmo again?