Bitcoin.com has released a new podcast episode featuring Stephen Pair, co-founder and CEO of BitPay, in a conversation hosted by Richard Jacobs. The discussion centers on BitPay’s evolution as a bitcoin payments company, the broader adoption of cryptocurrency-based merchant services, and the role of Bitcore as an open-source development stack for bitcoin and blockchain applications.
BitPay’s Growth Since Its 2011 Launch
According to the episode description, BitPay was founded in spring 2011 by Stephen Pair and Tony Gallippi. In its first year, the company helped bring 1,100 merchants into bitcoin acceptance, an early sign of commercial interest in decentralized digital currency payments. Over roughly six years, BitPay grew into what the program describes as the largest bitcoin payment processor in the world.
During the podcast, Pair reflects on the company’s early contributions to the bitcoin industry and outlines how BitPay scaled from a startup into a global payments infrastructure provider. The company now serves thousands of merchants across six continents, supporting a bitcoin payment experience used by thousands of people on a daily basis.
This trajectory is significant because it illustrates a practical side of bitcoin adoption that extends beyond trading and investment. Rather than focusing solely on the asset as a store of value or speculative vehicle, BitPay’s business model is built around making bitcoin usable in real commercial settings. That includes giving merchants tools to receive payments, manage billing, and expand alternative payment options for customers around the world.
Merchant Reach and Commercial Partnerships
The podcast also highlights BitPay’s partnerships with larger commercial brands. Pair notes that the company has worked with Microsoft, Warner Bros. Records, and Newegg, and has also collaborated with PayPal. These relationships underscore BitPay’s positioning as a bridge between the cryptocurrency economy and established merchants seeking to add bitcoin as a payment option.
In addition to merchant processing, BitPay offers a broader suite of bitcoin-based tools, including billing and donation services. The emphasis on global accessibility is notable: the company’s merchant solutions are presented as available to users and organizations worldwide. That international reach aligns with bitcoin’s original value proposition as a borderless payment network, especially in contexts where conventional payment systems can be costly, slow, or restrictive.
From an industry perspective, the episode suggests that merchant adoption remains one of the key benchmarks for measuring real-world utility in crypto. By enabling businesses to accept bitcoin in a more streamlined way, payment processors such as BitPay have played a visible role in turning cryptocurrency from a niche technological experiment into an operational payment method for mainstream businesses.
Bitcore and the Open-Source Development Stack
Beyond payments, Pair discusses Bitcore, one of the major open-source projects associated with BitPay. In the podcast, Bitcore is described as a full stack for bitcoin development and blockchain-based applications. Its components include a wallet client, APIs, a user interface, and a full node with extended capabilities, among other tools.
The goal of Bitcore is to make life easier for both developers and merchants building on bitcoin. By offering a JavaScript library and a broader suite of open-source infrastructure, the platform is designed to reduce friction in application development. Pair and the company argue that developers should not have to depend on proprietary APIs to build bitcoin services, and Bitcore is positioned as an alternative that promotes openness and flexibility.
This is an important theme in the broader crypto ecosystem. Infrastructure choices often shape who can participate in building applications and how much control they retain over their products. An open-source toolkit can lower barriers to entry, improve transparency, and give developers more autonomy over the technical foundations of wallets, payment systems, and blockchain-based services.
By bringing Bitcore into the conversation, the podcast broadens the story beyond BitPay’s merchant business. It shows that the company is not only focused on payment processing, but also on contributing technical resources that could support wider ecosystem development. That dual role—commercial service provider on one hand, open-source contributor on the other—has long been part of how crypto companies try to balance business growth with infrastructure building.
A Snapshot of Bitcoin Payments Maturing
The episode offers a useful snapshot of a period when bitcoin payments were moving from early experimentation toward broader commercial deployment. BitPay’s development from a startup founded in 2011 to a processor serving merchants across continents reflects how quickly payment infrastructure can evolve when market demand, developer tooling, and merchant integration begin to align.
Pair’s comments, as summarized in the article, point to two related trends. First, bitcoin payments were increasingly being operationalized for day-to-day business use. Second, supporting that adoption required more than merchant onboarding alone; it also required tooling such as Bitcore to help developers build applications without relying on closed systems.
For listeners and readers following the practical adoption of cryptocurrency, the discussion is relevant because it connects several foundational layers of the ecosystem: merchant acceptance, enterprise partnerships, developer infrastructure, and open-source philosophy. Together, those elements help explain why payment processors like BitPay occupied such an influential position in bitcoin’s early commercial expansion.
Bitcoin.com notes that its audience can listen to or download the full podcast episode for more detail. As presented in the accompanying article, the conversation with Stephen Pair is less about short-term market narratives and more about the mechanics of building usable crypto payment systems at scale. That makes it especially relevant for readers interested in how bitcoin moved from concept to commerce.