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CodaPay brings Bitcoin Payment Processing to Southeast Asian Merchants

Cardless payments startup, CodaPay, has partnered global bitcoin firm Luno (formerly BitX), to become the first major company to offer merchants bitcoin processing for merchants in Southeast Asia.

CodaPay, which names Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, Golden Gate Ventures and a Skype Co-Founder Toivo Annus as investors, offers a digital payment product designed for the Southeast Asia’s unbanked population. The company works with a number of big online companies in the region, including Baidu and Huawei.

“Our mission at Coda is to support any payment channel that will help our merchants monetize better in Southeast Asia. Given the low penetration of debit and credit cards in the region, we think bitcoin holds great promise as a way for customers to transact online.”
— – Neil Davidson, CodaPay CEO

Bitcoin’s use a retail payment option was one of its early selling points. After a large spike in activity during 2013, and a number a multi-billion dollar companies signing on, it has largely fallen by the wayside.

Bitpay, one of the main pioneers of bitcoin retail payments, recently admitted this in an interview with Business Insider, customers aren’t taking to digital currency as they hoped. “It’s going to take some time,” commented BitPay’s co-founder and CEO Stephen Pair. “In the industry there’s a realisation that yes it’s an incredible technology but it’s going to take a while for it to mature."

"We keep adding merchants — we’re up to over 60,000 now — but they’re selling to the same pool of Bitcoin early adopters,” he added, noting that the startup is now looking into how its bitcoin payment technology could be used by banks.

A recent post by BitPay revealed the number of merchant sign ups, and transaction growth for the first two years. While not particularly spectacular, the figures show solid growth in all regions. Asia saw minimal growth, where BitPay has limited operations, while Europe and North America were responsible for the vast majority of bitcoin transactions and new merchants.

Latin America really shined, with 510% growth in BitPay’s second quarter. The result was in part due to the company enabling the first Latin American airline to accept bitcoin.

“This past year we have observed bitcoin adoption take off despite the bitcoin price taking a downward turn. […] As time goes on, we anticipate seeing slow and steady growth in this region as merchants start considering using bitcoin to solve more complex business problems. Overall, these statistics are quite encouraging and will surely provide momentum to finish out the 2015 calendar year.”
— – Bitpay

Luno (formerly BitX), who is focused on bringing bitcoin to the developing world and already operates a number of exchanges in African and Asian countries, believes the same growth could be seen in Asia if properly pursued. Until recently, bitcoin payments have been largely unexplored in Asia, despite significant interest in bitcoin trading in countries like China and Singapore.

“We’re seeing tremendous growth in bitcoin activity in Southeast Asia and we believe that bitcoin will play a significant role in enabling fast, cheap and safe online transacting for large segments of the population that were previously excluded from this market,” added Marcus Swanepoel, CEO of Luno. “We are particularly pleased to partner with Coda given their deep local knowledge and presence across multiple markets.”


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