Bitcoin has taken another step toward inserting itself into the global financial system as Perseus Telecom, a provider of heavy-bandwidth telecommunications connections for securities exchanges and their customers, said it will accept payments in the digital currency.

"Bitcoin is a valuable digital asset and form of payment," said company chief executive Jock Percy.

He said the proposal to accept such payments didn't emerge from Perseus's traditional financial-services clients, but from businesses that provide online gaming to players around the world, an industry for which low-latency international connections are increasingly important.

"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,'" Mr. Percy said.

Still, Mr. Percy said the move was part of a strategy to position for an expected expansion in bitcoin transactions throughout the broader financial-services and securities-trading sector. He said he has detected growing interest in the bitcoin economy from the financial institutions he deals with. Perseus provides fast, high-volume connections to stock exchanges in the U.S., the U.K. and Brazil, as well as to hedge funds, high-speed trading firms, media organizations and other institutions engaged in the securities industry.

Perseus has signed up bitcoin payment-processor GoCoin to process receipts in the digital currency. Under the arrangement, the telecom company has the option to receive all the funds in bitcoin or to have GoCoin convert some or all the payments into dollars or whatever fiat currency the company requests. The arrangement, common among bitcoin payment-processing contracts, means that merchants can avoid exchange-rate volatility, which has been extreme for bitcoin over the past year.

For bitcoin, the development is significant because Perseus is one of the first major business-to-business enterprises to accept the digital currency beyond those, such as GoCoin, which service the nascent bitcoin economy. Until now, announcements from mainstream merchants adopting bitcoin have been dominated by retail-focused businesses: online retailers such as Overstock.com and Tiger Direct, for example, or gaming company Zynga and the National Basketball Association's Sacramento Kings.

Bitcoin enthusiasts will also likely see the firm's ties to Wall Street as a useful entree into the financial services industry, whose engagement with bitcoin is critical if the fledgling digital currency and payments system is to achieve full-scale acceptance in the global economy.

The move from Perseus "shows that people in the financial services industry are realizing that bitcoin is something significant and something that they should at least be thinking about and hopefully be embracing," said GoCoin Chairman Brock Pierce. An investor in various bitcoin-linked startups and a business associate of Google Inc. Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, Mr. Pierce is a high-profile advocate for bitcoin.

Bitcoin, the most prominent of a host of new virtual currencies, are created by a global network of digital "miners," whose computers discover them via complex computations and then serve as protectors of the integrity of the virtual money supply. A unique encryption system allows them to be transferred seamlessly and internationally between digital "wallets" without the need for a third-party intermediary or underlying transfer of cash. Compared with the relatively lengthy and costly process through which bank-wire transfers and credit-card payments are processed and approved, bitcoin transactions are quickly confirmed by the bitcoin network and incur near-zero transaction costs.

Regulators the world over are trying to figure out how to regulate commerce in the currency, with the uncertainty surrounding that process impeding its adoption and frequently weighing on its price.

The New York Department of Financial Services held two days of hearings this week to try to devise a framework for regulating digital currencies. This followed news Monday that New York U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara had arrested two men, including prominent bitcoin entrepreneur Charlie Shrem, on charges of helping users of the illicit drug-trading website Silk Road launder money through bitcoin exchanges.

Write to Michael J. Casey at michael.j.casey@wsj.com

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