How Counter-Strike Gaming Marketplace OPSkins is Pioneering Bitcoin Payments for Buyers and Sellers BitPay Follow Jan 21, 2016 · 3 min read

One of our newest gaming marketplace clients is also one of the first BitPay users to begin paying its sellers with bitcoin. OPSkins enables players of the popular online game CounterStrike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) to buy and sell the digital “skins” used to decorate CS:GO weapons. In its several months since launching its bitcoin integration, OPSkins has built a case that digital goods and digital currency are a perfect pairing.

Growing a Digital Skins Economy with Bitcoin

The demand for CS:GO skins first emerged from the gaming community on Steam, the online platform where Counter Strike: Global Offensive is played. The rarest patterns can sell for up to $10,000 U.S. dollars, and more common cases and keys can sell for less than $1 dollar.

OPSkins founders John Brechisci and Artur Minacov launched the company in January 2015 to meet growing demand for a reputable marketplace for CS:GO skin buyers. The site sold more than 5 million items since its launch, with approximately 3,000 new users joining every day. Now at more than one million users, OPSkins has proven to be a huge success among the CS:GO community.

Rare OPSkins patterns can sell for up to $10,000 U.S. dollars, and more common cases and keys can sell for less than $1.

OPSkins began accepting bitcoin in August after demand from their users, many of whom were already relying on online payment methods to trade for CS:GO skins with other gamers around the world. Accepting bitcoin payments for its Wallet Funds store credits has allowed OPSkins to expand that international reach while further reducing the risk of chargeback fraud in the skins economy.

Just a few months into accepting bitcoin, the company is already processing 400–500 bitcoin transactions per week. This traction has also shown up in the volume OPSkins has processed, with one notable transaction involving a bitcoin purchase of $25,000.

Launching Bitcoin Payouts for Sellers

OPSkins’ decision to implement bitcoin payouts had an unlikely origin. One of our senior sales engineers learned about OPSkins when his son — an avid CounterStrike player — came across the company’s “Pay With Bitcoin” option. OPSkins had already seen demand for bitcoin payouts from its marketplace sellers when our team first reached out. It was a simple next step to to begin working with the OPSkins team to launch the first full-scale use of our bitcoin masspay API.

OPSkins has been live with bitcoin payouts since October, and it’s had strong traction since the beginning. In addition to offering payouts via PayPal, the company uses our platform to pay out nearly $40,000 in bitcoin to its sellers every day. OPSkins expects these bitcoin payouts to grow in step with the fast pace of the incoming bitcoin transactions it’s begun to see in the past months.

OPSkins and its users are leading the way in showing bitcoin’s potential for fast, international batch payouts. We’re excited to work with them and other online platforms to find more powerful uses for bitcoin payouts and bitcoin payment acceptance alike.