BitPay – Get Paid in Bitcoins

https://bitpay.com/

BitPay was founded in 2011. BitPay is the largest Bitcoin payment processor in the world.BitPay is one of the earliest Bitcoin payment processing companies in the crypto-world. BitPay’s mission was to make it easy for businesses to accept Bitcoin as a payment mechanism. BitPay was early on understanding that Bitcoin would revolutionize payments industry.

The biggest problem with Bitcoin payments is volatility. BitPay takes care of it. BitPay, will make sure the merchant gets paid the right amount for the item by end of the day (by direct depositing the amount to their account). And BitPay takes the risk. Its interesting how BitPay might be doing these behind the scenes.

BitPay signup flow allows you to either have a Merchant account or a Credit card account (Where you can spend your bitcoins through a Visa credit card).

As per Bitpay documentation, BitPay has over 40 integrations with companies which accept payment, invoice etc.

The Good:

• Credit cards take up to 3% in processing fees on every transaction while Bitcoin processing using BitPay is 1%.
• BitPay locks in the exact exchange rate to cover for the volatility of Bitcoin and its delay in payments.
• BitPay has multiple Apis and mobile sdk integration for businesses to accept Bitcoin as a payment mechanism.
• BitPay takes the risk of payment value (based on bitcoin volatility) from the payers side.

The Bad:

• Only supports Bitcoin as a mode of payment.
• Due to high transaction fees of Bitcoin, BitPay as a minimum transaction requirement of 100$.
• Micropayments are not possible due to Bitcoin transaction fees growing by the day.
• Bitcoin as a payment mechanism is still not validated in mainstream.
• Tax implication is not clear yet, especially international transactions.