The leading provider of Bitcoin (BTC) and cryptocurrency payment services, BitPay, announced on Feb. 4 that the company will soon allow invoices to be paid from any Bitcoin wallet or exchange.

BitPay CEO Stephen Pair told Cointelegraph that the conclusion to enable merchant payments from any Bitcoin wallet was driven by merchant feedback, putting control back in the hands of over 30 chiliad active merchants currently using BitPay:

"BitPay's customers want to support all the Bitcoin wallets, just like they want to back up all cryptocurrencies for payments. The visitor has decided to re-enable back up for all wallets, which is referred to as evidently vanilla peer-to-peer transactions."

Pair mentioned that a phased rollout to support all Bitcoin wallets has already begun. One time the feature has been implemented, merchants volition be able to decide which wallets they will accept payments from, while consumers would be able to use whatsoever wallet to brand purchases from those merchants.

Pair also noted that merchants tin can have advantage of peer-to-peer transactions without whatever required technical evolution or implementation, explaining:

"We are going to automate the whole process for merchants, since we already have experience doing this already. It'southward very important for merchants to support all Bitcoin wallets, as this will greatly expand their potential to grow sales and acquire new customers."

What about BitPay'south BIP70 payment protocol?

The conclusion to restore service to all Bitcoin wallets comes after BitPay's rocky path towards success.

When the toll of Bitcoin was inching towards its all time high in 2022, Pair explained that BitPay was experiencing delays with almost 9% of customer payments. He noted that a number of customer back up issues were being reported at this time, pushing the company to implement the payment protocol known equally "BIP70." He said:

"At times, Bitcoin has been a victim of its own success. Equally adoption exploded in 2022 and 2022, network congestion and loftier transaction fees brought with them some tough decisions, like the one to implement Payment Protocol for all Bitcoin payments."

While BIP70 helped eliminate network congestion, it also limited users to certain Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Ether (ETH) wallets. According to a 2022 Reddit postal service, BitPay users complained that payments could non be made using some of the most popular wallets like Coinbase and Bitcoin Wallet.

JSON protocol will stay

Every bit BitPay begins to add support for all Bitcoin wallets, Pair mentioned that the platform will go on to employ the JSON payment protocol, "as nosotros take many wallets in the pipeline looking to back up that."

Pair explained that BitPay implemented its JSON payment protocol in February 2022 (in addition to BIP70) equally a issue of customer support bug. The JSON payment protocol helped reduce BitPay'due south error rates to nearly zero percentage at the time.

The dollar book lost to cryptocurrency payment errors dropped dramatically from over eight% (in Dec 2022) to well nether 1% of BitPay'due south full dollar volume processed.

A company blog post announcing the JSON payment protocol explained that the interface provides for direct communication between a wallet and BitPay's servers, noting:

"If a wallet submits an incorrect payment to BitPay, BitPay's servers volition reject the transaction. This prevents any transactions which volition result in a failed payment from reaching the Bitcoin blockchain and costing users unnecessary miner fees. Nosotros expect that this change will allow u.s.a. to reduce payment errors to zero."

As for wallets that conduct normal Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash transactions, Pair noted that BitPay expects to run into fewer payment errors and exceptions moving frontwards:

"Merchants accept increased opportunities for sales from millions of global wallet holders that have not implemented the payment protocol and consumers have more places to brand purchases. Equally a result, mainstream adoption for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is on the horizon."