The bitcoin payment processing company BitPay is scaling back its business.

The industry news site CoinDesk reports that BitPay has cut about 20 positions, just a day after it scrapped its "free and unlimited" bitcoin processing offer for new merchants.

In an email sent to its staff and seen by CoinDesk, BitPay CEO Stephen Pair said the decision to cut staffing number was necessary to "reduce costs" and "better align with the pace of growth" in the industry.

The Atlanta-based BitPay, which lets businesses accept bitcoin as payment, is one of the highest-profile bitcoin businesses in the US.

The four-year-old company raised $30 million (£19.2 million) last year from investors including Index Ventures, and it works with high-profile companies like Microsoft, PayPal, and Virgin Galactic (Sir Richard Branson is an investor).

Pair told Business Insider in June that the company was shifting its business model away from payment processing toward building tools using the technology behind bitcoin, such as accounting and clearing products.

That was because bitcoin wasn't catching on in the way evangelists had hoped.

Pair told Business Insider: "We keep adding merchants — we're up to over 60,000 now — but they're selling to the same pool of bitcoin early adopters."

"In the [bitcoin] industry there's a realisation that yes it's an incredible technology but it's going to take a while for it to mature."

Separately, BitPay lost $1.8 million in a phishing attack last December, according to court documents.

BitPay's website says the company is hiring, and it lists eight full-time vacancies.

In an emailed statement, Pair told Business Insider:

At BitPay, our company focus has always been on building the best technology platform and service for our customers.

In order to fulfil that mission, in a competitive and fast-moving marketplace, we have decided to restructure our workforce to better align ourselves with the pace of growth of the wider bitcoin economy. Sadly, this means we are losing valued members of our team. Those individuals will be leaving us with our heartfelt thanks – and we will be working with them as much as possible to help them find new opportunities.

We firmly believe this reorganization will not only help us serve our customers even more effectively, but it also offers us a clear path to profitability.

In founding BitPay we set out to create a core building block of the future Internet economy. We remain as committed and as excited about that journey as we were when we started the company four years ago.

You can read the full interview with Pair from earlier in the year here.