What do Facebook, AirBnB, Spotify, Groupon, Evernote, Soundcloud, Booking.com, Yelp, RyanAir, KLM, and Abercrombie & Fitch have in common?

No, it’s not a trick questions. Other than each being worth (in come cases many tens of) billions of dollars, they are all among the 3,500 global merchants to process online payments using Adyen, an Amsterdam-based payments platform that facilitated $25 billion in transactions in 2014. And as of yesterday, they are all now just the flip of a switch away from accepting bitcoin payments, thanks to a partnership between Adyen and Atlanta-based BitPay.

The deal is major news for the bitcoin ecosystem, which is fighting to establish global ubiquity and trust with regard to its digital, cryptology-based payment protocol. If any of the above giants were to choose to accept bitcoin, joining existing adoptees like Dell, Microsoft, Expedia.com, Overstock.com, TigerDirect, Wordpress, and Virgin Galactic, it would surely drive both legitimacy and adoption.

Bitpay has been adopted by more than 53,000 merchants, while Coinbase, its main competitor on the merchant payments front, has been adopted by 38,000. Collectively, more than 100,000 merchants are believed to accept bitcoin around the globe.

The first Adyen client to begin accepting bitcoin is UK-based Jagex, creators of RuneScape, a popular mobile and online game, according to a blog post by Bitpay. The company writes:

Through the integration each merchant’s bitcoin sales will be seamlessly included in their reporting and settlement from Adyen. These are the types of integrations needed to advance bitcoin.

Merchants choosing Adyen and BitPay will receive all the advantages of working with a stable, scalable payments platform. Adyen is a great company, and a strong partner, to help expand bitcoin adoption worldwide. Jagex has a history of being an early adopter of new payments technologies and business models, including being among the pioneers of the now ubiquitous free-to-play gaming model supported by in-app purchases. Jagex Payment Services Director David Parrott said in a statement:

An advantage of bitcoin is that it is still new and shiny enough to generate interest in the payment experience simply through the fact that it exists. There are people with investment in the system, looking for new and cool places to spend their cash. As a business that operates on a freemium model - where the payment process needs to be compelling enough to convert cost free customers into paying ones - not having a barrier to entry for bitcoin users makes sense.

Adyen, which supports 180 currencies and over 250 payment methods, was founded in 2006 and completed a $250 million Series B round led by General Atlantic in December, valuing the company at a reported $1.5 billion. BitPay has raised $32.5 million to date from investors that include TTV Capital, Felicis Ventures, Founders Fund, Horizons Ventures, Jerry Yang, Richard Branson, Barry Silbert, and Roger Ver.

Adyen joins many of the world’s largest payment processors in enabling bitcoin payments for their customers, including Stripe, Braintree, PayPal, and Square, typically through partnerships with either (or both) BitPay or Coinbase. The benefit for merchants of these partnerships is that they mean no additional technical integrations are required to begin accepting bitcoin. Typically all that’s required is the flip of a switch in their payments platform administrative panel and the creation of a respective bitcoin wallet account. This is much simpler that requiring merchants to integrate BitPay or Coinbase APIs into their existing technology stack, regardless of how easy such integrations may be.

While this partnership between BitPay and Adyen is no doubt good news for bitcoin in the grand scheme of things, it’s unlikely to boost prices considerably and instead could put further downward pressure in the near- to mid-term. The unfortunate reality is that most merchants accepting bitcoin today elect to immediately convert these incoming virtual payments into fiat currency, thus increasing the sell-side activity in the marketplace.

Longer term, however, as bitcoin adoption grows among merchants, their suppliers and vendors, and even their employees, it’s more likely that companies will consider retaining some or all of their incoming bitcoin payments and using them in the normal course of business. Similarly, as more merchants accept bitcoin, consumers will have more reason to acquire and hold the virtual currency. It will likely take time and increased confidence in the long term viability of bitcoin as a payment tool, not to mention relative stability in its value.

After a year in which bitcoin prices plummeted more than 50 percent in 2014 on a bevy of negative news and regulatory uncertainty, the headlines in 2015 have been largely positive; prices, however, have continued to decline. In the first month of the year alone the industry saw its largest ever venture round, the launch of its first regulated exchange (with plans for more), and PayPal subsidiary Braintree enabling online and in-app bitcoin payments for its network of thousands of merchants, including, Uber, AirBnB, and HotelTonight. On the flip side, a high profile exchange hack and the trial of accused Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbricht have weighed on sentiment.

Bitcoin’s price is hardly the only measure of its viability. Adoption by merchants and consumers is another strong indicator, as are regulatory approval, venture investment, and new company formation within the sector. As many industry experts like Mark Andreessen* have argued, price volatility is no surprise and in fact was a necessary and deliberate element of the bitcoin system design, meant to drive speculative adoption and early growth. Moreover, Andreessen argued in a state of bitcoin tweetstorm to begin the year that many of the most interesting applications for bitcoin and its underlying blockchain are price and volatility independent:

23/The price of BTC has very little to do with the level of creativity of thinking that's going into new Bitcoin apps, or their usefulness.

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) January 5, 2015 One thing of note in this Facebook-related news is that the social networking giant recently poached two senior executives from PayPal, including its former CEO David Marcus and VP of Growth Stan Chudnovsky. The two are currently working on Facebook’s Messenger product, which has recently seen competitors like WeChat, Snapchat, and Line add payment functionality. It’s hardly a stretch to think that Marcus and Chudnovsky could be cooking up a similar offering from PayPal, and now bitcoin is one step closer to being supported under such a scenario.

When Braintree finally turned on bitcoin functionality for its merchants, the big question everyone wanted answered was, when would sharing economy giants Uber and AirBnB begin accepting the virtual currency? Today, it only seems fair to turn the spotlight to Facebook, Spotify, and their ilk. How about it, Zuck and Ek?

(*Disclosure: Marc Andreessen is an investor in Pando.)