Payza Allows You To Instantly Sell Bitcoin and Enables Free Remittances For 21 Currencies

Payza’s new Bitcoin sell option has enabled free remittances for 21 currencies and 190 countries supported by Payza.

Payza, an online platform that allows money to be sent and received between its members, has made it possible to sell Bitcoin through their platform with their new Bitcoin deposit feature. They say the move is another step to their goal of fully integrating Bitcoin into their global payment platform. The company supports currencies ranging from the Hong Kong dollar, to the South African Rand, and of course, the Euro and US dollar.

In order to sell your Bitcoins, you simply go to the funds section in your account dashboard and click on the Bitcoin option. You then confirm your details, and you will be presented with a one time Bitcoin address which you send your Bitcoins to. If you don’t send the Bitcoins within 60 minutes, Payza will cancel the transaction. As soon as your deposit is confirmed, Payza will immediately put the fiat in your account.

Using the Bitcoin Deposit feature to add funds to your account is quick and easy. It’s a great, hassle-free way to sell your Bitcoin when the time is right.
— – Payza Blog

Ways to buy Bitcoin have been far more prevalent than ways to sell. Having off ramps for the Bitcoin ecosystem are equally important as on ramps. Without both, Bitcoin will have a liquidity problem. Payza’s addition of Bitcoin deposits will allow people to quickly and easily sell Bitcoin.

This news comes a few weeks after Circle, a Bitcoin consumer finance company, launched its financial services internationally. The company opened globally but only allowed people in the west to add bank accounts, making it difficult for a large portion of its users to add a method to sell and buy Bitcoin. Payza’s integration of numerous currencies makes it very attractive to people in countries forgotten by big Bitcoin exchanges.

[We’re] drastically bringing down the price of remittances – 2% total end-to-end. We’re going to be adding the ability to send deposit in bitcoin as well, so you can move bitcoin between accounts and it won’t cost anything.

This is huge news for remittance. People were able to buy Bitcoin and send it their family in Romanian or Malaysia, but the person receiving that money could not exchange that Bitcoin into their local currency quick enough to avoid volatility. Due to the lack of Bitcoin adoption by brick and mortar merchants, this often leaves the receivers unable to spend there Bitcoin, and often they appear useless to that person. They now will be able to receive Bitcoin and turn it into their local fiat through Payza’s new Bitcoin deposit feature. Users are usually charged a 2% fee to withdraw funds from their Payza account but the company made it free for Bitcoin. A UK Payza user could send Bitcoin from his account, to his friend working in Malaysia, and his friend would quickly be able to turn that Bitcoin into Malaysian Ringgit – costing nothing.

The company is not letting Bangladesh users transact in Bitcoin because of the country’s stance on Bitcoin. The Central Bank of Bangladesh banned Bitcoin in September of this year. The Southeast Asian country banned Bitcoin for not having a central payment system and "being potentially harmful". The exact laws invoked were the Foreign Currency Control Act of 1947 and the Money Laundering Control Act of 2012.

Payza made huge news when it announced you would be able to buy Bitcoin through its online platform in 190 countries through a bank transfer. This allowed its 100,000 plus merchants, and growing, to accept Bitcoin. The move greatly increases options to spend Bitcoin in countries without Bitcoin exchanges or any Bitcoin infrastructure at all.

The company divided the adoption of Bitcoin into 5 stages, in order to make sure the company was trained and prepared for Crypto-Currency correctly. Charlie Shrem, founder of BitInstant, has been an adviser to the company, helping them make this transition. The company pointed out, when it announced that it would allow its merchants to accept Bitcoin, that unlike Bitpay or Coinbase, Payza allows its clients to accept Bitcoin and via credit cards, making them a one stop shop for merchants.

Payza has very good relationships with regulators already [and] With Bitcoin companies […] they don’t have compliance officers, they’re kind of new to the scene, they don’t know what’s going on.
— – Charlie Sherm

Payza also has the major advantage over recently formed companies in that it has been in the digital payment business for almost a decade. They have built a solid business model and developed relationships with regulators around the world. They have been growing slowly but repeatedly making clear that they see Bitcoin as the future of payments and wish to fully integrate it into their platform. With the addition of being able to sell Bitcoin through their global payment platform, they become a more serious player in the global Bitcoin market and competitor to the current market leaders.

We have a distinct vision of how we would like to incorporate Bitcoins into our platform
— – Ali Nizameddine, Executive VP of Product and Technology at Payza

The company first announced their interest to incorporate Bitcoin into their platform in a blog post, earlier this year in May. The decision came after their  Director of Global Risk and Compliance, Ferhan Patel, attended Bitcoin 2014, the world’s largest annual Bitcoin conference. In the blog post, Patel said that the main hurdles were regulatory bodies, stating,

“Governing bodies around the world are still deciding how to treat Bitcoins. Are they property, are they currency? It’s still not clear. And the regulations in one territory won’t necessarily carry over to another. This is certainly an issue for Payza since we offer services in over 190 countries. First and foremost we must respect each country’s laws concerning Bitcoin."

The company did make it clear in the post that Crypto-Currency, especially Bitcoin, are clearly the future of payments. Further noting that as e-commerce business, they have a responsibility to incorporate Crypto-Currencies into their business offering.

Payza, with its new Bitcoin sell option, has made the dream of low cost remittances via Bitcoin possible.

Sophie is an artist whose secret passion is finance, economics, and technology. Shh! Don’t tell the artists she works with, they hate that kind of stuff. She loves keeping up with the ever expanding and evolving world of crypto-currency. When she isn’t painting, she can be found trying to understand the complex inner workings of markets. Another complex system she is fascinated by, are ecosystems. She often observes them on her daily hikes through nature.