Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
You wouldn’t know it from all the headline stories regarding the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, but below the surface commerce in digital currencies continues unabated, albeit still at very low volumes relative to commerce in fiat.
RocketFuel Blockchain Inc., a San Francisco crypto processor for e-commerce merchants, announced early Friday it expects its transaction count for the December quarter to come to 13 times the volume it saw in the September quarter, which itself saw a tenfold increase over the prior quarter. RocketFuel offers its service through independent sales organizations and other resellers.
While the numbers would seem to indicate a steady rise in merchant acceptance for crypto, RocketFuel did not immediately respond to an inquiry from Digital Transactions News regarding the absolute figures from which the percentages were calculated.
“The increase is due to both a steady increase in the number of merchants using our crypto and bank-transfer e-commerce payment solution, as well as the addition of several merchants who have provided significant transaction volume on a daily basis,” said chief executive Peter Jensen, in a statement. “We believe this validates our sales strategy of selling indirectly through payment service providers and other partners.”
Founded early in 2018, RocketFuel started seeing what it calls a “significant” increase in payments volume in September, an indication of momentum it says continues unabated. The company offers what it calls a “one-click” checkout for online transactions based on Bitcoin and more than 120 other digital currencies. It pays merchants in their local fiat currency to avoid the notorious volatility of crypto values.
In March, RocketFuel completed an integration with the major processing platform ACI Worldwide Inc. to enable ACI’s merchant clients to process crypto transactions. That service went global last month when ACI said it would support crypto transactions for merchants served by Vendo, a Swiss payments services provider that uses ACI’s platform.
In related news Friday, A London-based blockchain-based payments wallet called Centbee said it had raised $1 million in a pre-Series A funding by Ayre Ventures, which first invested in the company in 2019.
