BitFury Announces ‘Strategic Investment’ in Payment Platform GoCoin

BitFury Capital, the VC arm of the multifaceted BitFury Group, announced Wednesday it had invested an undisclosed amount in payment processor GoCoin. BitFury also said it would use GoCoin as the default payment processor for its worldwide network of vendors.

GoCoin will offer BitFury a little bit of cryptocurrency flexibility, as the company processes Litecoin and Dogecoin transactions in addition to Bitcoin transactions. PayPal selected GoCoin as one of its Bitcoin payment processors in September.

“Payment processing is a critical element in stimulating the Bitcoin economy," BitFury Capital managing partner Marat Kichikov said in a statement. “We are committed to supporting further acceptance and to enabling further adoption of cryptocurrencies. The partnership with GoCoin will allow processing payments in digital currency with our vendors and clients all over the world."

The BitFury Group is involved in many parts of the Bitcoin ecosystem. The company builds ASICs for mining and hardware for payment processors, operates data centers around the world, and has its own large mining operations.

"The goal is to bring all of [BitFury's vendors] into the ecosystem and have them accepting payments in Bitcoin via our platform,” GoCoin CEO Steve Beauregard told CoinDesk’s Pete Rizzo earlier this week. “So, everything from the providers of electricity to rack space to hosting services, you name it."

This is the BitFury Capital’s third investment since its founding in 2014. Previous investments included Bitcoin security infrastructure company BitGo, which Cointelegraph reported on in September.

Boom Times for Payment Processors

If you play a quick game of Follow the Money, you will find a great deal of apparent interest in payment processors, mostly for Bitcoin payments at this point.

In the last month, we have seen announced investments in San Francisco’s Bitnet (US$14 million) and Copenhagen’s Coinify (undisclosed amount).

Coinbase and BitPay, two of the giants in this space and co-processors for PayPal alongside GoCoin, have received total investments of US$31.7 million and US$32.5 million respectively, according to Crunchbase’s numbers.

“In a world with credit card transaction fees hitting merchants’ bottom lines and cross-border fees creating barriers to commerce, distributed trust systems like Bitcoin have the potential to disrupt established payment systems and offer significant benefits for merchants and consumers,” a company statement from Bitnet last week read.

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