A second domain name registrar, NameSilo.com announced that it was offering Bitcoin as a new method of payment on its website.
NameCheap.com became the 1st domain name registrar to offer BitCoin back in March of 2013.
The move makes NameSilo the latest established business to accept payment via the digital currency, and one of the first major domain registrars to do so.
“It is important to us to respond to the requests of our customers,” said Michael Goldfarb, co-founder of NameSilo. “Our customers made it clear to us that they desired more flexibility concerning how they pay for their domain services, and Bitcoin was referenced in many of those requests.”
NameSilo is accredited by ICANN and currently has over 30,000 customers from 177 different countries making payment flexibility critically important.
Bitcoin has no central authority and is available to anyone. Within minutes of offering Bitcoin, the first Bitcoin transaction occurred on NameSilo.
“Bitcoin’s track record for offering universally secure and flexible payments really got our attention,” said Michael McCallister, another one of NameSilo’s co-founders. “It is frustrating for us as a company to tell certain customers that we cannot offer services to them due to payment option limitations they may experience, due to where they reside or personal preference. Accepting Bitcoin will allow us to make domain registration available to many people who previously were unable to get a domain.”
NameSilo announced a few days earlier that it also began accepting Google Wallet payments. Google Wallet is currently available in 161 countries.
George Kirikos says
EasyDNS started accepting Bitcoin in April 2013:
http://blog.easydns.org/2013/04/16/we-now-accept-bitcoin-as-a-payment-method/
Technically speaking, NameCheap is just a reseller of eNom, so that means EasyDNS might have been the first true registrar to accept Bitcoin (not sure if other small registrars were before EasyDNS).
George Kirikos says
Just to be more precise, NameCheap *does* have an ICANN accreditation. Although, as of September 2013 (the most recent VeriSign monthly report), only 24 .com domains were registered with that accreditation (most are via the reseller relationship with eNom).
Mark Jeftovic says
Oh well.
Mark Jeftovic says
But Namesilo is definitely not the second. We were.
infodudeDOTit says
This news story was about NameSilo, NOT Namecheap.
NameSilo is NOT part of eNom.
NameCheap and NameSilo are totally different comapnies.
NameSilo are independent.