The Infinite Brief

Jonathan Johnson, an Overstock board member, said: “We pay a processing fee for credit cards, and we employ about 40 people in our fraud department. That’s a cost of doing business with credit cards. When we take cryptocurrency, we have a very small transaction fee with Coinbase, much smaller than our credit card processing fee, and we have no fraud prevention department. It’s like a cash transaction. For us, that is a much cheaper way of doing business.”

“We have somewhere between $68,000 and $120,000 a week in cryptocurrency revenues; people buying sheets and toasters using Bitcoin or Ethereum or other coins,” Johnson said in his address.

This means that Overstock can have up to $6.2 million per year in cryptocurrency revenue, a staggering number. Overstock’s underlying profit from these transactions is much higher than equivalent purchases using a credit card, due to crypto payments low processing fees.

Overstock’s stock surged over 11% on the news of the cryptocurrency program’s success.