BitPay Reaches 10K Merchants Milestone

September 30, 2013         By: Kevin Xu

BitPay has announced that it has nabbed its 10,000th merchant. BitPay is a payment service provider that allows merchants to accept bitcoins through mobile-to-mobile and online transactions.

In the month of August, BitPay processed 10,000 merchant transactions totaling over $6.4 million. The payment provider serviced 1,000 merchants compared to just last year. This growth stems from mainly word-of-mouth from bitcoin enthusiasts, since BitPay has done little to no actual marketing. Most of their seed funding was spent on building out the infrastructure necessary carry out automated and speedy transactions.

BitPay has an international reach; these merchants are located in 164 countries, which serves as a reminder of the global payment network that bitcoin has the potential to create.

50% of BitPay’s merchants are located domestically in the United States, 25% of merchants are in Europe, and the other 25% are located elsewhere.

90% of BitPay’s business comes from online merchants. Part of the draw of accepting bitcoins comes from BitPay’s real-time bitcoin quotes and conversions to currency, and transfers of the funds to the merchant’s account.

This is particularly attractive for merchants selling more expensive items, since payments are quick, and merchants can avoid chargebacks.

BitPay also now supports Intuit’s Quickbooks accounting software. Merchants can now organize and keep tabs of their BitPay transactions through Quickbooks, and is completely automated, which perhaps serves to make accepting bitcoin payments simpler and less familiar.

Bryan Krohn, CFO of BitPay, says that BitPay moves $7-$8 million dollars in bitcoins a month. BitPay sees a correlation between the price of bitcoin and the volume of transactions since people are more inclined to part with their bitcoins when it has more purchasing power.

As for the future? Krohn, like many bitcoin advocates, says that ideally, bitcoin can be the next big thing in worldwide e-commerce.