Braintree, a subsidiary of eBay (eBay acquired Braintree in an all-cash £800 million deal almost a year ago) that deals with the payment processing for a number of popular mobile apps, recently announced that it would be accepting Bitcoin payments in the near future. Braintree, which also processes the payments for companies such as Airbnb and Uber, will be accepting the virtual currency “Over the coming months” according to Braintree CEO, Bill Ready. The move will let websites and apps run their payments through Braintree (which itself is part of eBay's 'PayPal') so that Bitcoin can be accepted as a legitimate payment method. For those unfamiliar with Bitcoin, it's essentially a currency generated “When computers running specialised software solves complex mathematical equations,” which has gained in popularity as users speculate it will increase in value over time (it's currently values at around $476). Other notable companies that have started to accept Bitcoin include Dell and Overstock.com.
The move would let websites and apps run their payments through Braintree so that Bitcoin could be accepted as a legitimate payment method
Ready recently spoke at San Francisco's TechCrunch Disrupt conference, where he announced that the company has partnered with Bitcoin exchange company 'Coinbase' and will be one of the first major payment groups to embrace the Bitcoin revolution. He said that they will allow their merchants to accept Bitcoin soon and that “On the consumer side, it will be a sleek experience.” It should be noted, however, that whilst eBay owns Braintree, the online auction site has yet to confirm itself, whether or not it will accept the currency. PayPal has also remained tight-lipped about whether or not it will accept the currency, at least for now, though Ready has said that as Braintree is the go-to developer platform for PayPal, this is effectively “PayPal making a move to embrace Bitcoin.” Gil Luria, an analyst at Wedbuch Securities agrees, stating that Braintree's acceptance of Bitcoin “Opens the door for PayPal to integrate Bitcoin into its main wallet functionality,” and that he believes “If that happens millions of retailers will de facto be accepting Bitcoin overnight.”
On why it's taken them this long to make a move, Ready said “The reason why we were watching it up to this point is that a lot of things needed to be solved in order for us to have a leading use case,” and that “There were regulatory questions and questions over whether it would be easy for merchants and consumers to use.” It would appear that after months of testing they are finally (almost) ready to go, with developers who have integrated Braintree software development kits able to add Bitcoin to their payment methods very soon. No specifics have been given yet on which Braintree merchants will be integrating Bitcoin payment into their systems and a beta program launch date has yet to be announced.
It should be noted, however, that whilst eBay owns Braintree, the online auction site has yet to confirm itself whether or not it will accept the currency
Braintree is also unveiling a way for people to pay from their mobile devices across different apps with just a single touch, eliminating the need for user names and passwords. The logic is that, whilst over half of e-commerce shopping experiences happen online, only around 10% of them happen on smartphones because “People just bail out.” Early launch partners for the single-touch purchase scheme include Jane.com, ParkWhiz, StubHub and Type Tees by Threadless.
Benjamin Hiorns is a freelance writer and musician who won't even pretend to understand the intricacies of Bitcoin. It sounds nifty though!
