One of the biggest struggles in the cryptocurrency industry is that of finding a way to make the currency mainstream, while maintaining its decentralization. Overstock was one of the first major retailers to jump on board with the acceptance of Bitcoin for their purchases, and they are looking to make their involvement a little more significant. In fact, with the help of Bitsy, Overstock will now provide an option to purchase Bitcoin on their website.
Even with the recent worry about what could happen with Wall Street adapting to cryptocurrency, this issue seems to be entirely separate for CEO Patrick Byrne. There are many other major players that have decided to side with Bitcoin, like Citi, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and others. Overstock has been tied in with the coin for a while and followed Yahoo Finance after the company decided to let their US customers purchase and sell tokens.
Overstock.com has been around for over 10 years, coming into the commerce industry just two short years before Bitcoin was born. Officially, according to Byrne, they should have the technology in place to sell Bitcoin “by Q1 or Q2 of next year.”
When Byrne spoke to Forbes, he said that the feature will be with the use of Bitsy, which is a crypto wallet that comes from a subsidiary of Overstock – Medici Ventures. Right now, reports suggest that there is a beta version already launched, and the testing phase will continue as Bitsy brings in their crypto wallet technology to Overtstock.com.
This retailer presently has over 23 million registered users, and it serves customers around the world. However, reports have not shown whether Bitcoin services will be available outside of the United States. Byrne remains confident about this expansion, saying, “When you had all these dot-com companies crashing, it wasn’t because something was wrong with the internet technology. Coins are going to come and go, but we’re long-term long on blockchain technology. There’s a parallel universe emerging with crypto, and I see Overstock as the wormhole between the two universes. You’re going to be seeing us bring this to our retail consumer base.”
One of the concerns that investors had was that Byrne sold about $20.7 million of shares, bringing down the price by 12%. To reassure investors, he said, “Within a matter of days, I will reinvest most of this money into two co-investments with Overstock and Medici Ventures (thus I am eating a double dose of my own cooking, as months ago I promised you I would).”