Crowdfunding with Bitcoin

Update: Bitcoin has been moved into our IgnitionDeck Commerce plugin as one of our integrated payment gateways. No extension required. Please see our post on the CoinPayments integration for more information.

One of the core principals of IgnitionDeck is that crowdfunding shouldn’t require a middleman. It’s for that reason we took our time before adopting 100% crowdfunding, and the same reason that we’ve agonized over every new feature and payment gateway.

One of the most frustrating portions of the crowdfunding and fundraising process is that of trying to negotiate with payment gateways in order to earn the approval to accept live transactions. While Stripe certainly makes this easy in the US, many traditional payment gateways are simply going out of their way to make it difficult for crowdfunders to get started.

On top of that, we’ve heard from hundreds of users who have struggled to find gateways that work in their country and/or support their currency of choice.

When you add processing fees on top, suddenly each consecutive option becomes less and less appealing.

Considering those factors against our core philosophy, combined with continued spurring from Bitcoiners in the crowd, we realized that harnessing the power of Bitcoin within the IgnitionDeck crowdfunding platform should be a no brainer.

Buying Bitcoin has never been simpler, and most Bitcoin to Bitcoin transactions are completely free. When they aren’t, the fees generally less than a third of a standard Paypal or credit card transaction fee. Better yet, Bitcoins live in the digital world, and because of that, are free from currency and international restrictions.

When you say it all at once, it might sound too good to be true, but that’s what makes it special.

We’re super excited to announce what we hope to be one of the most useful IgnitionDeck payment gateways in the bunch, IgnitionDeck Bitcoin Payments (requires IgnitionDeck 1.01). It works on its own, or with any of our current payment gateways. We believe in Bitcoin so much we’ll soon be adding the same functionality to our IgnitionDeck Commerce plugin, which will allow you to pay for our software with Bitcoins instead of cash.

Although we’re releasing this as a 1.0, we still have more plans in store. There are many more Bitcoin APIs we want to integrate, and we’re looking to support as many transaction types as we can. This is just the beginning of crowdfunding with Bitcoin and Ignitiondeck.