BitFury Invests in GoCoin for Payments Processing Push

BitFury Capital has announced an undisclosed strategic investment in digital currency merchant processor GoCoin.

The move marks the third investment for BitFury Capital, the venture capital arm of bitcoin mining hardware and services provider BitFury. As part of the deal, BitFury indicated that it will seek to use GoCoin as the default processor for its global vendors.

In an interview, GoCoin CEO Steve Beauregard framed the investment as one that would also add new business-to-business (B2B) clients to his company's existing customer base.

Beauregard told CoinDesk:

"The goal is to bring all of [BitFury's vendors] into the ecosystem and have them accepting payments in bitcoin via our platform. So, everything from the providers of electricity to rack space to hosting services, you name it."

BitFury Capital managing partner Marat Kichikov stated that the investment also demonstrates that BitFury is committed to building the bitcoin ecosystem – an important part of which, it believes, is payment processing.

Boosting bitcoin's infrastructure

The move marks BitFury Capital's first investment in a payment processor since it began extending capital to the ecosystem this August. To date, BitFury Capital has invested in bitcoin enterprise security firm BitGo and an undisclosed wallet provider.

Representatives from BitFury indicated at the time that both these initial investments were made in bitcoin.

“As the leading bitcoin infrastructure provider and bitcoin transaction processing company, BitFury uses every opportunity to further enable global bitcoin adoption by making as many financial transactions in bitcoin as possible," the company said.

At press time, it is not clear if this latest investment was also carried out with bitcoin.

GoCoin gains momentum

The investment is the latest validation of GoCoin as a market leader in the industry's increasingly competitive merchant processing space.

This September, GoCoin was notably added as a processing partner in PayPal's Payments Hub alongside its arguably more visible competitors in the US market, BitPay and Coinbase.

GoCoin's key differentiator is that it allows its merchants to accept altcoins such as litecoin and dogecoin in addition to bitcoin. The option has so far appealed to major merchants such as BTC Trip, CheapAir and Hustler.

However, Beauregard was quick to stress how his system is built from the ground up to enable the addition of more digital currencies as the market requires.

"We also continue to look beyond just bitcoin to altcoins," he said. "I think that [BitFury and GoCoin] share a vision, that we're all sort of watching out for the next major developments in the digital currency space."

Images via GoCoin and Shutterstock