Bitcoin Merchant Adoption Might Just Be Accelerating In Asia

Not only is bitcoin a sought-after choice for business-to-business payments, but for retail payments, other cryptocurrencies are finding a foothold as well.

One of the early use cases highlighting bitcoin's innovation was cross-border payments where there were bottlenecks and high fees for transacting.

According to BitPay CEO Stephen Pair, Bellatorra's experience in circumventing cumbersome traditional payments rails with crypto isn't uncommon.

"We are definitely pro-cryptocurrency as a payment option," Halsey said, adding that the company has started holding onto small amounts of the cryptocurrencies it accepts instead of immediately cashing out.

Since BitPay doesn't facilitate merchant payments in anything other than bitcoin and bitcoin cash, Bellatorra had to establish relationships with other processors to enable these cryptocurrency payments.

According to Halsey, using PayWithEther.com and GoUrl.io, Bellatorra garnered dozens of litecoin and ether payments from predominantly Asian customers spending roughly $300 to $1,000 per order.

The rapid growth of B2B bitcoin payments still dwarfs altcoin use cases for retail payments.

To get an idea of the size of the market, international B2B payments now account for roughly 15 percent of BitPay's business.

That's after a 328 percent increase in the payments dollar volume BitPay took in between 2016 and 2017.

Chief commercial officer at BitPay, told CoinDesk he expects those payments to increase another fourfold in 2018.