BitPay is “on pace” to process $1 bln per year in Bitcoin payments as its merchants see a combined 328 percent annual volume growth.

In a blog post released Monday, the flagship Bitcoin payments gateway said it had seen “major growth” in the last year particularly, with the majority of activity stemming from its US market.

“We're now on pace to process over $1 bln annually in Bitcoin payment acceptance and payouts, and we've already grown our payments dollar volume 328 percent year-over-year from 2016,” the company confirmed.

This year has seen BitPay grace the headlines, announcing exclusive partnerships such as the multimillion-dollar Dubai Aston Plaza real estate project with the UK’s Baroness Mone.

At the same time, its support of the upcoming SegWit2x hard fork has received mixed reactions, with cryptocurrency scam listings service Badbitcoin.org even explicitly threatening to remove BitPay from its safelist over the decision.

With Bitcoin remaining over $4,000, however, business is booming for merchants worldwide thanks to increased regulatory clarity. Japanese efforts to drastically increase its merchant acceptance of Bitcoin also continues.

“Merchants in the Asia-Pacific region now receive a significant portion of our monthly transactions,” BitPay commented on the growth in the sector.

Through its links with local payment outfit AsiaPay, major clients such as Tesla and Cathay Pacific “can choose to easily accept Bitcoin payments from their Asian customers by activating AsiaPay's BitPay integration.”

Announcements of Bitcoin acceptance by major corporations remain few and far between, however. This week, a rumor Amazon would finally begin accepting the virtual currency was debunked as likely fake news.