Users of Vaultoro are now able to purchase physical gold with Bitcoin and 35+ altcoins, including Dogecoin, Litecoin, Namecoin, Monero and others. The bitcoin gold exchange integrated the ShapeShift API on June 3.

Vaultoro’s integration of ShapeShift and the “alt-coin” deposit function makes Vaultoro the world’s first gold exchange to accept both bitcoin and altcoins.

Once a user sends an altcoin (for example, Dash) to the requesting address provided by ShapeShift, it is automatically converted to bitcoin and then sent instantly to Vaultoro. After six network confirmations, the deposit is verified and ready to trade.

The Co-founder of Vaultoro, Joshua Scigala, announced:

“We were wanting to offer multiple altcoin payment options to customers and ShapeShift.io was the perfect answer. Their API is elegant and was so simple to incorporate into our platform.”

In conjunction with the announcement of Scigala, Bitcoin entrepreneur and ShapeShift CEO, Erik Voorhees commented,

“Cryptocurrency, like gold and silver, is real money because its value comes from the market, not from government diktat. With this integration, it's now easier for people all over the world to trade between these forms of real money, and avoid fiat currencies entirely.”

As reported by Cointelegraph in February, Vaultoro’s trading platform exclusively supports bitcoin and gold, completely eliminating fiat from the process. "Gold protects people against the price volatility of bitcoin without them ever having to go back into fiat currencies, which is attractive to a large number of the Bitcoin community," the exchange explained.

Vaultoro is also the first bitcoin gold exchange to be 100% insured, audited by the world’s fifth largest accountancy network, BDO international. The gold traded on Vaultoro’s trading platform is secured in top-tier and professional investment grade Swiss bullion vaults.

At the end of 2013, Co-Founder Scigala fell victim to the fall of MtGox and had a few of his bitcoins in MtGox bitcoin exchange compromised. The incident motivated Scigala to build a fully auditable bitcoin exchange which users can trust.

Prioritizing security, Vaultoro offers several types of bitcoin wallets – a hot wallet for daily trades, a warm wallet for auditing purposes and multi-sig cold wallets, in which where most of the users’ funds are held. Due to the multi-sig technology implementation of Vaultoro’s bitcoin wallet, the private keys of the users will not be compromised even if Vaultoro was to be hacked.

Apart from Vaultoro, the ShapeShift API is integrated with many bitcoin- and altcoin-oriented startups globally. ShapeShift continues to integrate their instantaneous bitcoin and altcoin exchange system on platforms globally.