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OneBit has announced a bitcoin wallet app that will allow users to spend bitcoin anywhere through the Mastercard PayPass payment network.

The OneBit app will convert bitcoins into local fiat currency at the market rate via BitPay with no fees. The app has not been publicly released yet and can be requested in the early access mode. The entrepreneur who developed OneBit Toby Hoenisch plans to launch the app on July 28th.

Toby Hoenisch has revealed more details about the startup on Reddit. The app is using CoinKite’s APIs for bitcoin transactions and storage. The NFC payments system is fundamental to the project, which determines the startup’s choice of the Android platform as well as geographical preferences:

“In the US, only 15% of the payment terminals have NFC. Europe is much more interesting in that regard. So yes, UK will be one of the main target countries,” the entrepreneur said.

The project was developed at the MasterCard Hackathon and currently is taking part in the selection days of Startupbootcamp FinTech, a fintech accelerator in Singapore. If selected, the startup will have access to the DBS bank network. When the project is launched, MasterCard will be OneBit’s partner although no plastic card will be needed for transactions and payments will be processed through the mobile bitcoin wallet. Hoenisch sees as his goal making bitcoin payments universally accessible and he believes that the startup could benefit from collaboration with Samsung:

“I had the idea of OneBit when I saw the presentation of Samsung Pay and Loop Pay. And that's the ultimate end goal: to integrate with LoopPay (new Samsung Devices) which will allow you to pay at any credit-card terminal directly with Bitcoin,” he said.

Collaboration with Samsung would also solve the problem of the scarcity of the NFC payment terminals in the US because of the potential for integration with Loop Pay, a new technology that allows customers to store all their credit and debit cards on their smartphone and to pay contactlessly on swipe card terminals.

Samsung has been rumoured to be looking into bitcoin technology for new applications. A Silicon Valley-based research department of the electronics giant has started exploring the potential of the bitcoin blockchain, the Bloomberg reports.

Advanced Cash, an online payment platform, has launched the bitcoin integration recently that allows to pay in bitcoin with MasterCard plastic cards. A bitcoin debit card was released by CoinJar in Australia. CoinFox wrote earlier this year about the Circle Android application that supports NFC (Near-Field Communication) technology.