Short on the heels of our Nigeria launch and our Series A news, we're very happy to announce our partnership with Codapay: a cardless payment processor active in Southeast Asia. This makes Codapay (backed by e-commerce giant Rakuten, Golden Gate Ventures and a Skype cofounder) the first multi-currency payment gateway in the region to allow their merchants' customers to pay with bitcoin.

This integration is similar to our PayFast partnership in South Africa, which allows buyers to pay in bitcoin, but for merchants to receive their local currency.

How does it work?

The BitX API allows businesses and payment processors to display the locally supported currency amount (say 100 Malaysian ringgit) to their customers during checkout. Bitcoin is shown alongside existing payment methods and when selected, the exact exchange rate at that time (say 100 Malaysian ringgit = 0.091 bitcoin) is shown. The buyer then makes the bitcoin payment and BitX immediately converts it into the local currency (back to 100 Malaysian ringgit), which we pay over into the business/payment processor’s Malaysian bank account.

Neither the seller, nor the payment processor ever holds bitcoin, so neither of them are exposed to the exchange rate volatility.

Southeast Asia has some tremendous opportunities in the payments space: a very high percentage of smartphone users with huge growth in e-commerce, paired with a very low percentage of cardholders. This makes bitcoin a particularly attractive payment method, especially since the merchants enjoy zero risk from chargeback and fraud.

Bitcoin is already available from this week as a payment method to customers in Malaysia and Indonesia on Codashop, Codapay’s own online gift card and game voucher distribution platform. Users can purchase Steam wallet codes, iTunes gift cards, Google Play gift cards and more. We will be announcing more regions and merchants soon.

Merchants in Southeast Asia interested in adding bitcoin (and other cardless payment methods) for their physical or digital goods can sign up with Codapay.

You can download the CodaPay press release here.