BITNEWS: Details on Apple Pay, BrainTree, PayPal and Bitcoin Plus Gem, TechCrunch Disrupt’s First Bitcoin Company to Demo
We have some big updates from Apple, BrainTree and Gem, the first TechCrunch Disrupt Bitcoin Startup.
Apple launched ‘Apple Pay,’ today at their long awaited keynote event in Cupertino. DUN DUN DUN!!!
Ok. While we were wrong that Apple might be launching their own digital currency, it seems they have definitely gone ahead to open up their own currency wallet. It isn’t called the iWallet but that hasn’t stopped Apple from announcing their NFC-powered digital wallet for the iPhone 6.
So what is Apple Pay? Apple is describing Apple Pay as a service which the company calls “an entirely new payment process.” It will use their patented Near Field Communication technology, embedded on top of Apple’s new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Apple is also partnered with major banks for the service, including Bank of America, Capital One, Chase, Citibank and Wells Fargo.
Now let’s talk about some major numbers. According to Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, Eddy Cue, the deals mean Apple is accounting for 83 percent of U.S. credit card purchase volumes. Plus 22,000 retailers will work with Apple Pay including Macy’s, Bloomingdales, Walgreens, Whole Foods, Duane Reade, Subway, Staples, Toys ‘R’ Us, and McDonalds to support the mobile payments system so point of sale terminals that work with the system are ready to handle Apple Pay purchases from Apple customers.
VentureBeat has reported that Apple Pay is only available in the U.S. for the upcoming iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, and integrates with Apple’s Passbook app (which originally launched with iOS 7, that thing that stores your concert tickets and such). Apple Pay will also work with the newly announced Apple Watch.
Speaking on stage at its keynote event, Apple chief Tim Cook criticized credit cards as a technology “five decades old.” With this launch, Apple has set up partnerships with major retailers like McDonalds, Whole Foods, Disney, Target.
built in partnership with American Express and Visa. During the event, Apple revealed that Apple Pay also supports Master Card.
So no, Apple didn’t quite come up with its own digital currency or alt coin just yet as we have speculated in the past but they are entering the digital money game. It’s been clear for quite some time that Apple would eventually invest in mobile payments. Back in April, Apple revealed that its users had registered 800 million iTunes accounts, many of which have credit cards attached. Adding to that activity, everyone also knows Apple customers are also avid buyers of iTunes cards with iTunes credits. iTunes revenue during the first quarter of this year alone? $5.2 billion in iTunes purchases.
Apple’s new payments service will challenge rival mobile payments projects such as Softcard, formerly carrier-backed ISIS backed by Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility and T-Mobile US and Google Wallet, both of which are yet to be proven and widely adopted.
Banking technology site Bank Innovation reported hours ahead of the event that Square and PayPal partnered with Apple on its upcoming payments service. Square had its own wallet app, but pulled it back in May.
Oh wait…let’s make a note to revisit that PayPal partnership again in relation to Bitcoin and digital currency with the next update. In the meantime, Apple does support several Bitcoin apps including: Bit Wallet, Blockchain, Coin Pocket and is accepting Bitcoin apps again.
(For a complete list of everything Apple announced today, head to http://venturebeat.com/tag/iphone-6-launch/
Pay Uber, AirBnB and Merchants with PayPal? Someday, Maybe Soon
Yesterday it became a possibility that we could all Pay Uber, AirBNB and possibly even through PayPal in Bitcoin someday soon if things progress in the right direction. EBay’s PayPal unit service BrainTree now accepts bitcoins, opening up the world’s second-biggest Internet payment network to virtual currency transactions.
Braintree, a part of PayPal’s unit, is an online and mobile payments platform that powers simple, powerful payments enabling companies to accept credit cards, debit cards and PayPal, and Bitcoin supporters hope acceptance will spread.
Nearly a year ago PayPal acquired BrainTree in an all-cash $800 million deal and just yesterday the online and mobile payments platform unveiled one-touch payments and that it is integrating Bitcoin.
Bill Ready, who led the company through its sale, says that mobile conversion rates are lagging behind desktop transactions. And it’s no secret to anyone that a large reason for that is that it’s a lot more tedious to enter or re-enter credit card information on mobile devices, the mobile payment process is just plain clunky. Ready says that more than half of e-commerce shopping experiences happen on mobile devices, but only 10 to 15 percent of purchases occur on smartphones.
“The reason for that gap is that there’s a two-thirds to 75 percent fall off in conversion,” according to Ready is that, “People just bail out.”
In an effort to ease that painpoint, Braintree unveiled One Touch™, so people can pay across different apps with a single touch, eliminating the need for usernames and passwords. Early launch partners include Jane.com, ParkWhiz, StubHub and Type Tees by Threadless.
With One Touch™ you only need to log in once on your device and instantly pay in mobile apps.
Their open ecosystem means you’re not locked into somebody else’s rules. One Touch™ is included in BrainTree’s v.zero SDK, an open platform that offers a variety of payment methods including widely used consumer wallets like PayPal, Venmo, is integrateable with major credit/debit cards, and whatever new payment methods may emerge in the future and is platform agnostic.
BrainTree also offers partners comprehensive protection against fraud and is branding itself asthe fastest way to pay on mobile.
No more typing in credit card numbers, re-entering usernames and passwords in every app. Customers simply click “Buy” and they’re done.
The goal is to drive a “better conversion rate on mobile than on desktop,” he said. “You should be able to get a strong amount of ecommerce sessions on phones and buys.”
On top of that, they’re partnering with Y Combinator and Andreessen Horowitz-backed Coinbase to enable Bitcoin-based payments.
YEP. YOU HEARD THAT RIGHT.
It’s been reported that Ready himself told TechCrunch yesterday that “This is PayPal making a move to embrace Bitcoin,” pointing out that Braintree is the go-to developer platform for PayPal.
That ability could launch in the coming months!!! Developers who have integrated Braintree’s software development kit will also be able to add Bitcoin to their payment methods. It’s a win for the San Francisco-based Bitcoin wallet and merchant payments processing platform, which recently secured deals with Wikipedia and Overstock.
Now let’s think about what this potentially means for Bitcoin adoption. Braintree supports very large partners like Uber, Airbnb and Dropbox. Ready says it’s still growing at 25 percent quarter-over-quarter even after handling $14 billion in volume around the time that eBay acquired it.
Braintree, which provides a platform for companies like Uber and Airbnb to accept payments, has announced yesterday that it is partnering with Bitcoin payment processor Coinbase to let users pay for things in Bitcoin from a Coinbase wallet. The news is big for Bitcoin.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says that they “had a lot of developers tell us they’d love to add Bitcoin. Braintree would handle all of their payments and they didn’t want to add another SDK or software development kit. If Braintree added it, they would add it.” And the rest, as they say is HISTORY.
If Braintree-supported merchants choose to enable Bitcoin payments, they’ll need a Coinbase wallet. The integration will support instant exchanges, meaning that the merchant doesn’t have to handle Bitcoin directly and can get an immediate conversion rate between a fiat currency and Bitcoin through Coinbase.
In a blog post, CEO Bill Ready said that “in the coming months” Braintree’s customers would be able to “add bitcoin to their existing payment methods and provide an elegant, adaptive user interface for consumers to pay in bitcoin with their Coinbase wallet.”
While it’s unclear which, if any, merchants of record and yet to partner have decided to incorporate Bitcoin into their accepted payment methods with Braintree, but this recent development shows that PayPal is thinking about bringing alternative forms of payment into its fold.
Coinbase has recently powered a number of companies acceptance of Bitcoin as a payment option. Most notably, online retailer Overstock.com, Reeds Jewelers and Wikipedia. Dell Inc. began accepting bitcoins in July, while Dish Networks Corp and Expedia Inc. also accept the virtual currency. In total, about 63,000 businesses handle bitcoins, and users have set up more than 5 million digital wallets to keep their holdings at the end of June, according to CoinDesk, a website tracking the digital money’s use.
“Today we’re announcing PayPal’s first foray into bitcoin,” Bill Ready, the chief of EBay’s Braintree unit, said at Techcrunch’s Disrupt SF conference on Monday September 8, 2014. “Over the coming months we’ll allow our merchants to accept bitcoin. On the consumer side it will be a sleek experience.”
EBay, as the world’s biggest Web marketplace and operator of a global payments service, will be the most significant business to date that’s embraced bitcoin. The move could potentially enable PayPal’s 152 million registered accounts to transact using the virtual currency, spurring wider use and acceptance of bitcoin, according to Gil Luria, an analyst at Wedbush Securities Inc.
“PayPal integrating bitcoin into Braintree is a very substantial development,” Luria said. “Not only will it make it possible for some of the fastest-growing apps to integrate bitcoin seamlessly, it opens the door for PayPal to integrate bitcoin into its main wallet functionality. If that happens millions of retailers will de facto be accepting bitcoin overnight.”
Braintree on its own provides payment capabilities on websites and in mobile apps such as mobile car-booking service Uber Technologies Inc. and Airbnb Inc. So there are possibilities there as well. PayPal and Braintree will work with bitcoin payment-service provider Coinbase Inc. to enable payments in the virtual currency, according to Ready.
More details can be found here: http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/08/paypal-braintree/
And another story from TechCrunch Disrupt. Avoid getting Gox’d!!!
We report on the first-ever Bitcoin company at TechCrunch Disrupt which helps solve crypto’s security issues.
Yesterday at TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield, the first Bitcoin-oriented startup to ever compete inDisrupt’s Battlefield, Gem (formely known asBitVault), a Bitcoin platform for developers has launched a new full-stack API for digital currency developers that eliminates the pain of building Bitcoin security infrastructure into their apps. (Watch the presentation here:http://on.aol.com/video/send-and-receive-bitcoins-effortlessly-with-gem-518406383)
In the wake of recent security challenges in the industry resulting in the loss or theft of over half a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin, not to mention other notorious 4chan-related “cloud” snafus involving single-factor authentication hacking of private files, ahem Jennifer Lawrence and celebrities’ cloud saved photos hacked, Gem introduces what they are calling the only digital currency infrastructure to protect Bitcoin balances that doesn’t require developers to be experts in security or cryptography.
Gem’s solution, which can be deployed by developers in minutes, utilizes a three-key multi-signature system and several other integrated bank-grade security features to ensure Bitcoin wallets and funds are always secure and accessible. The combination of multi-signature technology with best-in-class authentication and monitoring systems in one comprehensive platform makes the Gem solution a first for the digital currency world.
With under ten lines of code, Gem’s complete solution gives developers the freedom to focus on delivering Bitcoin applications with built in, bank-level security.
Selected as one of 30 companies competing for a chance to win $50,000 and the coveted Disrupt Cup, Gem’s full-stack API now provides developers with a complete solution that eliminates the pain of building Bitcoin security infrastructure into their apps.
Founded by Bitcoin thought leader, open-source contributor, and community organizer Micah Winkelspecht, Gem offers a simple, yet powerful platform for securing Bitcoin and other digital currencies. The importance of protecting Bitcoin balances and transactions is now mandatory and necessary.
“The major issue plaguing the digital currency community is security, and our goal is to dismantle fear surrounding digital currency and educate mainstream consumers on how they can maintain their currencies and other electronic assets with better security and ease-of-use,” said Winkelspecht, CEO and Founder of Gem. “TechCrunch Disrupt was the ideal forum to introduce our powerful infrastructure and key-management capabilities to technology’s key players and enthusiasts.”
Some key components include:
Two-of-three multi-signature key technology
Multi-factor device authentication
Real-time bank level fraud and identification monitoring
Cold Storage offline key backup
Redundant architecture with military-grade encryption
The role of Gem is to make developers’ lives easier by enabling them to integrate secure Bitcoin infrastructure into their apps in just minutes. Built using technology that eliminates any single point of failure, Gem’s use of multi-signature technology means that the end customers (not Gem) is in control of their funds, unlike typical demand accounts with financial institutions, where the security of their funds lies completely in the hands of the institution.
“Traditional banking and payment technologies performed a valuable function in society, but they are outdated and cannot keep up with present day threats. The latest credit card hacks against Home Depot and Target are painful reminders of that,” said Ken Miller, COO at Gem and former VP of Risk Management at PayPal, referring to a string of recent data breaches that have resulted in thousands of credit card numbers purportedly stolen from the major retailers.
And while Bitcoin appears to hold a tremendous amount of promise for replacing these systems, the uptick in mainstream user adoption has not yet matched the fervor of the core Bitcoin community. Gem believes this is due to a lack of high quality apps that deliver both a great user experience and an assurance of security to the mainstream consumer.
“Right now if you want to build an app that uses Bitcoin, you not only have to build an amazing product, but you also have to be an expert in cryptography, security and the underlying Bitcoin protocols. With Gem, developers can build their entire stack on our platform with less than ten lines of code so they can focus on building product, not infrastructure,” said Winkelspecht. “We built our platform for developers who share our mission of empowering individuals to take control of their own assets, and we believe people shouldn’t have to sacrifice convenience for security.”
Alight! That’s it for this update folks!
Hope you have a great day. Bye guys!