BitPay has become one of the biggest success stories in the bitcoin economy. Each month, the bitcoin payments processor continues to add merchants and businesses to its growing list – some of the names on its list include Zynga, TigerDirect, WordPress, Virgin Galactic, Euro Pacific Metals and more. Its largest competitor is Coinbase.
It may come as no surprise then to discover that BitPay processes $1 million worth of bitcoin payments every single day, according to a report published by NewsBTC. This is up from last year when BitPay processed nearly 210,000 digital currency transactions worth about $110 million.
Earlier this month, BitPay raised $30 million in series A funding, which is so far the biggest investment made in the peer-to-peer decentralized virtual currency industry. The funding was led by Index Ventures in collaboration with investors like billionaire bitcoin proponent Richard Branson, Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang and PayPal founder Peter Thiel.
Backers of the digital currency have called it “the pioneer of a global currency.”
Overstock.com
One of the websites that has been a staunch supporter of bitcoin is making a substantial sum of money. Speaking in an interview with Fox Business News “Opening Bell” on Tuesday, Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne confirmed that since January the company has received approximately $1.6 million in bitcoin payments to date.
Byrne added that the website keeps 10 percent of bitcoin and then transfers the other 90 percent in order to pay its suppliers. Despite its immense sum of money earned with bitcoin, only one percent of the items purchased on Overstock.com are paid with the digital currency.
Nevertheless, Byrne argued that although the market is small it is growing exponentially.
“Bitcoin is tiny at this point, but it’s growing about 25 percent a month,” said Byrne. “In terms of actual transactions in a day, I think it’s $300 million a day. It’s surpassing PayPal, at this point, in terms of transactions. But, it is growing very quickly.”
The price of bitcoin has surged in recent days as it is trading at more than $560, up from $450 a week ago.
