What’s one of the biggest things in the market today that angel investors are pouring their money into? Bitcoin startups, an industry that received $117 million to this date in investments from venture capitalists, according to a report from Aite Group, a research firm, entitled “Bitcoin: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”

In North America alone, investors have helped fund 19 bitcoin startups and allocated $98.6 million in investments to these small companies. In Asia, there were nine bitcoin startups that received $13.3 million and three in Europe with $5.6 million.

To generate widespread attention, the research organization suggested for the digital currency to improve its technical issues, the network needs to make transactions a lot faster and there has to be more transparency due to regulatory worries.

“A lot of kinks need to be worked out before this utopian promise can be realized, however; the nascent Bitcoin ecosystem is truly akin to the wild, Wild West,” Julie Conroy, an analyst at Aite,

We reported earlier this week that Goldman Sachs published a report that stated it believes bitcoin has a future as an innovative payment technology but nothing else. It also projected that it could create savings of approximately $200 billion worldwide for consumers, merchants and money transfer service users.

In the financial institution’s report, it also urged the bitcoin development community to enhance its security capabilities. According to Goldman Sachs, the biggest hurdle for the virtual currency is staying alive because of all of the hurdles being placed in front of it: government, regulations, competition, media reports and operating costs.

More and more merchants are accepting bitcoin as a payment option. It was reported Thursday that two Philippine daily deal websites, CashCashPinoy and MetroDeal, would begin to allow customers to pay in the cryptocurrency.