BIPS
| Industry | Bitcoin payment processor / consumer wallet |
| Founded | July 2011 |
| Headquarters | Copenhagen, Denmark |
BIPS was a Copenhagen-based bitcoin payment service provider and consumer wallet operator. It offered merchant plugins, hosted invoices, point-of-sale tools, and a consumer market to buy and sell bitcoins. The company was founded in July 2011.
Merchant tools
For merchants on eCommerce platforms, BIPS offered bitcoin plugins. Merchants without a cart could use Hosted Invoices for catalogues, shopping-cart buttons, recurring billing by email invoice links, or BIP70 payment requests. Point-of-sale material described NFC tap-to-pay and sound-based payment signalling. BIPS charged merchants 0% payment-processing fees, with revenue from the conversion spread. Settled bitcoins could be sent to a bank account in 1–5 business days, or retained as bitcoin.
Consumer wallet
BIPS also provided a consumer market to buy bitcoins and to receive payouts to banks in various currencies. After the November 2013 breach described below, consumer wallet functions were wound down.
November 2013 theft
In November 2013 BIPS was hit by a distributed denial-of-service attack and a follow-on intrusion. About 1,295 BTC, then worth over US$1 million, were stolen. CEO Kris Henriksen said most of the missing funds were from the company’s own holdings. Merchants who had chosen instant fiat conversion were not affected. Wallet functions were disabled while merchant payment services were restored.[1][2]
After that breach, BIPS wound down consumer wallet functions.