Perseus Telecom, a high-speed, heavy-bandwidth communications channel provider for major global stock and securities exchanges, has revealed today that it will accept bitcoin payments.
Perseus connects hedge funds, high-speed trading firms, media organizations and stock exchanges in the world’s top trading centers, including: Brazil, Dublin, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, London, Madrid, Moscow, New York, Stockholm and Tokyo.
Commenting on the news, Jock Percy, Perseus’ CEO, called bitcoin “a valuable digital asset and form of payment”, and indicated in an interview that it was not the company’s traditional financial services clients that brought about the decision.
Rather, Percy noted it was his customers who provide online gaming to worldwide players who were the key drivers:
“They reached out to us and a couple of them said: ‘We would like to pay in bitcoin because it’s the currency of our user base.'”
Positioning for expansion
Still, Percy, who joined the company in 2010, sees its bitcoin decision as one that positions it for future growth in customer bases that have yet to emerge.
For example, the CEO said he expects an expansion in bitcoin transactions throughout the financial services and securities trading sectors in the future.
However, until then, expansion is expected to continue rapidly in the gaming sector, as more major online gaming providers begin experimenting with and accepting bitcoin.
Of course, certain aspects of the deal are geared toward limiting Perseus’ short-term risk from bitcoin’s price volatility.
The company selected Singapore and California-based bitcoin payment gateway GoCoin as its processor, and under the terms of the deal, Perseus may choose whether to receive bitcoin payments in BTC or convert all or part of its payments into USD.
GoCoin’s latest customer
Founded in 2013, GoCoin is one of the newer payment processors serving the industry, though, it is already making headlines for its funding and innovative service features.
In November, the company raised $550,000 as part of a seed funding round led by a former COO of Facebook, and in January if became one of the first bitcoin processors to begin accepting litecoin.
GoCoin Chairman Brock Pierce weighed in on the impact of the news, saying that it shows that the traditional financial services industry is realizing bitcoin is “something that they should at least be thinking about”, if not embracing.
Opening the B2B market
Perseus’ acceptance is likely to be seen as a boon for bitcoin, given its status as a reputable supplier of services to major traditional financial exchanges and a major player in the business-to-business (B2B) sector.
As executives in the developing world have noted, one of the as-yet-untapped benefits of bitcoin could be its ability to remove restrictions on global trade that are caused by a lack of financial services.
Perseus’ acceptance of bitcoin, if successful, could be another step toward raising awareness and spurring this adoption.
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