The payment of BitPay invoices had been mandatory under the Payment Protocol since 2017. The company will integrate into its offer the payment of invoices from different wallets and exchanges.
It was announced that BitPay decided to remove its invoice payment restrictions, which allows users to choose the wallet or exchange from which they want to pay. The recent measure confirms that the deployment to incorporate new payment options will be gradually made.
The platform had been operating for two years with a reduced offer of around 17 wallets that could be used. The limitation had been imposed in 2017 when BitPay decided to implement a mandatory Payment Protocol. The company aimed to avoid erroneous transactions and reject incorrect payment amounts, thus reducing the costs and delays caused by money reimbursement.
The protocol is based on the BIP 70 function, which generates an invoice over a secure SSL connection. If a customer wants to pay an invoice, he or she can connect directly to the Bitcoin address of the recipient of that payment. In this way, the possibility of making mistakes when paying a trader for a product or service is reduced.
Although this method is in theory intended to secure transactions, it has caused dissatisfaction in the bitcoiner community. As not all wallets comply with BIP 70, a limited group of wallets can interact with BitPay invoices. For that reason, users of the platform were forced to move to other wallets to use their service.
Platforms such as Exodus, BTC.com, CoinText, and BitPay itself were among the few that provided invoice payment services. Only 13 Bitcoin address wallets and about 3 Ethereum key chains were compatible with BIP 70. This latest change in BitPay’s policies represents an opening to the market, after years of restrictions. Customers will now be able to use their favorite exchanges or wallets to pay traders, irrespective of company preference.
Several Reasons to Change
Stephen Pair, CEO of BitPay, says that the action was taken after listening to advice from traders and customers of the platform. He said that the move was made to give its users more freedom, as well as to seek a larger number of customers.
Even though this could have motivated BitPay to change its policies, there are undoubtedly other factors to consider, such as the rejection of the Payment Protocol in the Bitcoin community. In a discussion, users of the platform stated that the mandatory nature of the function was inconvenient.
Customers preferred BIP 70 to be an option rather than a measure to be fulfilled by all since it limited their possibility to choose. The feature had been active on the BitPay platform since 2014, but the company decided to make it mandatory in 2017 to reduce errors in transactions that represented up to 8% of its total volume.
It should be noted that the high level of rejection of the measure led developer Matthew Zipkin to create a tool to circumvent it. The BitcoinToolkit website converts BitPay invoice URL into simple Bitcoin addresses, thus allowing payment from any wallet.
Riccardo Spagni, a member of the Monero team, notes that the company lost several of its major customers and decided to take this action as a contingency. This theory is not unreasonable, considering that a growing number of cryptocurrency payment providers, such as BTCPay, manage to succeed in this market.
By Alexander Salazar
