Today we're announcing a new partnership with payment and travel IT platform Ypsilon.Net, the backbone for much of the European travel industry. Ypsilon.Net has integrated our bitcoin payment gateway API into its payment platform, allowing any of its customers in Europe and around the world to activate bitcoin payments on their sites.

Ypsilon.Net is unique in the travel tech industry because it provides a hybrid solution of payment processing and booking engines for air travel, car rentals, and hotels. Its e-travel tools are used by tens of thousands of agencies worldwide, and the company processes millions of transactions per month across its platform. It sees the most activity in Germany, where 80% of travel sites rely on Ypsilon.Net.

Ypsilon.Net's first customer to activate bitcoin payments is Nurflug.de, a Germany based booking platform. Bitcoin will be the first truly universal payment method on the site, allowing Nurflug.de customers anywhere on earth to pay for their bookings in seconds.

Because it cuts out the significant cost of chargeback fraud and traditional card processing fees, bitcoin is ideally-suited to high-value transactions like plane and hotel bookings. It has no additional PCI compliance cost for merchants that choose to accept it, making it easy for businesses to offer greater choice to customers booking online or from other countries.

We look forward to working with Ypsilon to bring bitcoin payments to its users in Europe. Bitcoin has exciting opportunities in the travel industry, and this will be an important step in seeing those opportunities take off.