11 Feb 2014 / Crains New York – Fiverr, a global online marketplace for people who offer low-cost services, has begun accepting payment in the digital currency known as Bitcoin.
The company, which is based in Tel Aviv but has its marketing and sales headquarters in New York, announced Tuesday that it has partnered with Bitcoin payments company Coinbase, which will handle the purely digital transactions.
Services for sale on Fiverr range from article-writing to voiceovers and logo designs, with each one starting at $5. The move by the company—which joins Fancy.com, OKCupid and Overstock among online businesses that accept Bitcoin—marks one more advance for the still obscure, stateless currency whose advocates claim it represents the future of money.
Practical advantages of using Bitcoin include no transaction fees if the seller keeps the payment in Bitcoin. There is a 1% charge to convert to local currency, but the fee is waived on the first $1 million in merchant processing, a Fiverr spokeswoman said.
Though Fiverr might not see much Bitcoin traffic for a while, the company said that adding it as an option was easy and cheap, and that some users will find it more convenient than conventional payment methods such as credit cards and PayPal.
“We serve customers from 196 countries,” said Fiverr co-founder and CEO Micha Kaufman in an interview. “Bitcoin is a global currency, and that’s not the case with other kinds of payment.”
Bitcoins consist of blocks of code that are held in a digital wallet on a computer or mobile device. The coins are “mined” by computer programs that can decipher complex mathematical puzzles, and traded on exchanges….. Read more
