PayFast makes way for Bitcoin purchases in SA

PayFast, a South African payment gateway, has revealed the addition of Bitcoin as a payment method on its platform. The integration, in partnership with the BitX exchange, allows buyers to make Bitcoin purchases at tens of thousands of online sellers, with the sellers receiving South African rand in return.There are currently over 30,000 PayFast accounts that will be able to receive payments using the digital currency, in addition to credit cards, Instant EFT and certain voucher payment methods.

Jonathan Smit, MD and founder of PayFast stated that: “PayFast is a forward thinking company and we are embracing changes in the payment landscape by choosing to facilitate Bitcoin payments. BitX has made it easy for us to do this without having to take a position on the instrument. We are not really sure what will happen with Bitcoin going forward as it is still early days for the “currency”, but we’re interested in contributing to the ecosystem and seeing where it goes.

”Marcus Swanepoel, CEO of BitX added: “We are very excited to partner with PayFast to bring the benefits of crypto-currency to a much broader market, especially with the very clear value proposition they bring to their merchants. At BitX we continuously aim to make it easier for individuals and businesses to buy, sell, spend and receive their Bitcoin, and this partnership is a testimony of our commitment to this promise.”

According to the company, when a buyer makes a Bitcoin payment using PayFast, they do it at the current exchange rate, provided by the BitX exchange. The exchange, in turn, communicates with PayFast if the payment was successfully received and the seller’s PayFast account is then credited with the appropriate rand amount.

The price on the seller’s website is still listed in South African rand and they will receive the appropriate amount, regardless of the XBT/ZAR exchange rate.

Sellers who accept direct Bitcoin payments have thus far been at the mercy of the volatile crypto-currency, or had to continuously update their product prices in accordance with the fluctuations.

“Until now, Bitcoin has only been accepted at a handful of online merchants in South Africa and we’re very excited to see what effect this large scale enablement will have on the market,” said Smit.According to Forbes, Google has added Bitcoin currency conversion to search. Google is working with Coinbase to support the Bitcoin conversions. This is a similar move that Microsoft made in February with its Bing.com search engine. Yahoo! added Bitcoin pricing to Yahoo! Finance last month and Bloomberg added it to financial terminals in April. This feature builds on Google’s addition of Bitcoin to a currency tracker in Google Finance last month.