BitFury Invests in African Bitcoin Payments Platform BitPesa
Global Bitcoin Blockchain infrastructure provider and transaction processing company BitFury has announced their investment in African Bitcoin payments platform BitPesa.
BitPesa is a hybrid enterprise-level Bitcoin payments platform which allows individuals and businesses worldwide to send payments to Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda and Tanzania. The firm operates Africa’s most efficient and regulation-compliant bitcoin exchange that enables users to trade bitcoin with deep liquidity. As an Authorized Payment Institution licensed by the Financial Conduct Authority, BitPesa has gained a solid reputation amongst local Bitcoin communities and international businesses by maintaining tight relationships with its institutional clients.
BitPesa is also one of the few legal bitcoin companies on the continent to offer bank deposits and withdrawals, which allows customers to use bitcoin to exchange directly between African currencies and other global currencies with substantially high international conversion rates and low transaction fees.
Understanding the presence of BitPesa and its reputation in the African states, BitFury decided to secure a strategic relationship with the BitPesa team, to collaborate in providing a more secure and transparent form of exchange to African bitcoin users.
“Our mission is to make global transacting easier, especially for those who continue to face obstacles to financial growth,” said Valery Vavilov, CEO of BitFury. “A secure, transparent and trusted form of exchange is being made possible by BitPesa, and our investment will allow us to work together to leverage the innovative power of the Bitcoin Blockchain for the benefit of the entire pan-African continent.”
Since its previous funding round in February of 2015, BitPesa focused its operations on providing a secure bitcoin service for users in Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda and Tanzania by partnering with local payment networks and remittance networks to make bitcoin payments more accessible to the general public. Initially, the company started out by offering a remittance service to bridge freelancer and expat workers located in UK who needed to send money back to their families and friends in Kenya. Their take on bitcoin-based remittance payment services gained a lot of attention from the mainstream media and the local market in Kenya, allowing the team to generate enough revenue to exapnd their services accross Nigeria, Uganda and Tanzania.
Due to the increasing demand for Bitcoin and alternative cryptocurrencies, BitPesa began to provide its customers with a bitcoin trading platform, through which users can trade bitcoin with low conversion rates.
With the financial assistance and network of BitFury, the BitPesa team led by CEO Elizabeth Rosiello aims to focus on targeting the frontier markets and expand its services throughout Africa to provide an international and widely used bitcoin payments platform.
“It has been great to have the support of the BitFury Group, who work extremely hard to build community among companies working with bitcoin, large and small. Valery and his team have a long history working in frontier markets and nothing is more important to our team than an understanding and support of the work we do,” said Rosiello.
