There is upside for Atlanta in Overstock’s decision to start accepting bitcoins: The city is home to a growing number of companies built around the cyber-currency.
BitPay, for example, is a processor that handles bitcoin payments for merchants. It’s currently only one of three in the country. Each are vying for Overstock’s business.
“Any time you get a major Wall Street CEO coming out and endorsing your technology, it’s always a good thing,” said Tony Gallippi, BitPay’s co-founder and chief executive. The processor is already working with several other national retailers with revenues of between $1 billion and $5 billion, he said.
The company charges either a 1 percent fee for the transactions it processes, or flat fees of between $30 and $3,000 a month for ancillary services revolving around those payments, such as account management, Quickbooks integration and online acceptance tools.
The metro area is also home to CoinX, an Atlanta exchange that's in private beta while it's acquiring money transmitter licenses across the country; Atlanta Bitcoin, which operates a bitcoin ATM; and CampBX, which maintains a bitcoin trading platform.
Gallippi said part of the reason he and BitPay’s co-founder located the the business in Atlanta is because of the city’s history as a hub of financial technology.
Atlanta was the first place the Federal Reserve tested automated check processing in the 1950s. Today, roughly 70 percent of the world’s card purchases flow through Georgia.
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