The price of bitcoin rose the 5th day in a row Monday, with a $15 increase to $225 at Bitstamp, a leading exchange. While still below the all-time high prices of the past April, the market capitalization of bitcoin is now at an all-time high value of $2.7bn. (Additional bitcoin have been released in the mining race, which is why the market cap could be at its highest even though prices are still a bit below the highest ever.)

Meanwhile, TechCrunch reports Ebay and its subsidiary, the payments industry titan Paypal, are at least keeping an eye on bitcoin, if not actually mulling over some kind of acceptance or adoption of the digital currency.

In the Financial Times, eBay President / CEO John Donahoe also said that digital currency is going to be “a very powerful thing”.

He had told the Wall Street Journal in April that eBay was “watching Bitcoin closely” and PayPal president David Marcus noted on multiple occasions an interest in adopting bitcoin.

Indeed, eBay’s Deals blog asked last month, “What’s the deal with Bitcoins anyway?” and later a Youtube video which answers that question quite well ended with the phrase: “brought to you by eBay Deals”.

Regardless of whether a payments industry heavyweight like Paypal gets on board with Bitcoin, Canadian startup Coinkite has launched a payments service, still in beta-release by invitation only, which promises to bridge that gap. It claims to offer and link together an online bitcoin wallet, a merchant POS system, and further security features in the emerging business of crypto-banking. “Use bitcoins just as you would with online banking and debit cards.”

More Canadian bitcoin startups could emerge soon, perhaps due to a more supportive regulatory environment, according to ITbusiness.ca. Even though a Las Vegas company, Robocoin, produced the world’s first Bitcoin ATM, Vancouver managed the coup of opening up the first model.

“The US – and particularly individual states like New York and California – have been unclear and unsupportive of digital currency,” says Michael Terpin, co-founder of BitAngels, a new network of angel investors. He is speaking today in Toronto about Bitcoin-related startups.

Nonetheless, a U.S. venture-backed startup Circle Internet Financial just received $9M in funding, more than the $5M Coinbase has received and the $2.5M in funding for Bitpay.