Alternet Systems Inc. announced a new strategic partnership with BitPay, one of the world’s leaders in business solutions for Bitcoin and digital currencies. Alternet system is a business facilitator for digital currency and mobile services companies. Its subsidiary, Alternet Payment Solutions, will be working directly with BitPay in the launch of its global payment processing business. Alternet Systems CEO Henryk Dabrowski said about the new arrangement:

"Alternet is providing a next generation digital currency and payment ecosystem focused on three distinct segments of the marketplace which includes comprehensive currency processing, identification and transmission. Our strategic agreement with BitPay will allow us to initiate our sales process with several potential clients in Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region. We believe that our backlog of opportunities will continue to grow globally and we will generate our first revenues from this business in the fourth quarter of 2014."

The non-exclusive agreement allows Alternet Payment Systems (APS) to both sell and support BitPay platforms to the Alternet customer base. APS has a great deal of experience in both mobile and disruptive technologies in the payment industry. The company wants to expand its role by being able to help businesses to convert local currency to Bitcoin and Bitcoin to fiat currencies in the Americas from Greenland to Terra del Fuego and the Asian Pacific region.

Tony Gallippi, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of BitPay, stated. 

"Digital currency adoption and user demand for alternative payment methods continue to rapidly grow globally. We believe in the vision and successful past experience of introducing disruptive payment technologies that Alternet Systems possess, and look forward to working together to expand our global reach."

This is clearly an aggressive expansion by both companies and both are hoping that disruptive technologies will be the key for them. Dabrowski said about this subject:

"With Alternet's experience in disruptive payment technologies and a network that spans many countries that contain leading mobile operators, financial service providers and banks; we believe APS will rapidly deploy BitPay's solutions in these markets. This will also broaden our global service offering related to facilitating transactions beyond utilizing Ven, a global digital currency traded on international markets and originally used by members of the social network service Hub Culture. We now have a reliable and secure partner to fulfill transactions with Bitcoin. Together, we will enable customers the ability to fulfill digital currency transactions online and through mobile devices." 

There are now tens of thousands of merchants that accept Bitcoin globally, some of them extremely large. Just this year Newegg, TigerDirect and Dell computers have begun accepting Bitcoin as payment. BitPay currently processes payment for more than 40,000 businesses and more than $1 million in daily sales. We can probably look forward to more fusions like this happening in the digital currency industry over the next few years.

BitPay has also accepted another merchant to its growing client base. Shipito.com announced that they will be accepting Bitcoin payments through BitPay. Shipito solves an important problem for consumers, especially in the Third World, who want to buy products made in the United States because many US companies refuse to ship internationally. Customers use the US shipping address provided by Shipito when making a purchase. When the package arrives Shipito ships it directly to their office in the customer’s country where it can be picked up.

The new arrangement with BitPay will allow customers to pay for goods with Bitcoin. The company processes thousands of packages every single day. BitPay’s Gallippi says:

“Shipito.com is a perfect fit for Bitcoin as both help lower the costs for various products on a global basis, giving international customers access to top e-commerce outlets.”

Shipping fees are much like remittance fees charged by money transfer services and banks. They are a huge burden to people, especially in remote areas, who have little access to banking services and usually much lower incomes. This new union will allow these customers to pay lower fees than ever before. Shipito CEO John, Vanhara was very positive about the collaboration:

“We are looking forward to offering Bitcoin as a payment option. Our collaboration with BitPay is really about doing what’s best for our customers. This move will allow us to ship to areas where banking is complicated and costly. We look forward to serving an expanding customer base.”

BitPay continues to expand its base and bring together elements that strengthen the community as a whole without moving toward centralization. We hope to see more moves like this in the industry that will allow Bitcoin and other virtual currencies to flourish.

* Bogdan Ulm contributed to the writing of this article.

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