Bitcoin.com has released a new podcast episode featuring Stephen Pair, co-founder and CEO of BitPay, in a conversation with host Richard Jacobs about the company’s growth, the evolution of bitcoin payments, and BitPay’s open-source development efforts through Bitcore.
BitPay’s early expansion in bitcoin payments
According to the episode, BitPay was founded by Stephen Pair and Tony Gallippi in the spring of 2011. The company saw rapid traction in its first year, helping 1,100 merchants begin accepting bitcoin. Over the following six years, BitPay grew into what the program describes as the world’s largest bitcoin payment processor.
In the interview, Pair reflects on BitPay’s earliest contributions to the bitcoin industry and how the business expanded from a startup focused on merchant acceptance into a large-scale payments platform. The discussion frames BitPay’s development as part of the broader push to turn bitcoin from a niche digital asset into a usable payment method for businesses and consumers.
A global merchant network across six continents
Pair says BitPay now serves thousands of merchants across six continents, enabling a bitcoin payment experience used by thousands of people on a daily basis. The company’s tools are positioned as globally accessible merchant solutions that support not only direct payments, but also billing and donation use cases.
The podcast highlights several major commercial relationships associated with BitPay, including work with Microsoft, Warner Bros. Records, and Newegg. It also notes collaboration with PayPal. These examples are presented as evidence that bitcoin-based payments were beginning to find use beyond crypto-native circles, with larger brands exploring ways to integrate digital currency into customer-facing payment flows.
Rather than focusing only on speculative interest in bitcoin, the discussion emphasizes transaction utility. Pair describes BitPay’s role as building infrastructure that allows merchants to accept bitcoin in a smoother and more practical way, while giving users a payment experience that can function in everyday settings.
Bitcore and the open-source development strategy
Beyond payments, Pair also discusses Bitcore, one of the open-source projects BitPay has been developing. The podcast describes Bitcore as a full stack for bitcoin development and blockchain-based applications. Its components include a wallet client, API tools, a user interface, and a full node with extended capabilities.
The project is designed to make it easier for developers and merchants to build bitcoin applications, especially through a JavaScript library intended to simplify integration work. In the conversation, Pair and the company argue that developers should not have to rely on proprietary APIs when building on bitcoin. Bitcore is therefore presented as an open alternative aimed at giving builders more control and flexibility.
This open-source angle is an important part of the episode’s broader message. While BitPay is best known as a commercial bitcoin payment processor, the podcast also portrays the company as a contributor to the ecosystem’s technical infrastructure. By pairing merchant services with developer tools, BitPay appears to be positioning itself at both the application and protocol-support layers of the bitcoin economy.
Podcast focus: payments, infrastructure, and adoption
The conversation ultimately centers on two parallel tracks in BitPay’s strategy. The first is adoption through merchant services: making it easier for businesses around the world to accept bitcoin for commerce, invoicing, and donations. The second is ecosystem enablement through Bitcore: providing open-source software components that can help developers create new bitcoin and blockchain applications without depending on closed systems.
Within that framework, Pair’s appearance on the Bitcoin.com podcast serves as both a retrospective and a status update. It revisits how BitPay moved from an early bitcoin startup into a global processor serving merchants at scale, while also underscoring the company’s continuing interest in tooling and infrastructure.
Listeners are invited by Bitcoin.com to stream or download the full episode, which expands on BitPay’s operating model, its merchant footprint, and the thinking behind Bitcore. The episode also asks the audience for their views on BitPay as a payment processor and on Bitcore as an open-source initiative.
Overall, the podcast presents BitPay as a company working on two of the most practical areas in the bitcoin sector: real-world payments and developer infrastructure. Through Pair’s remarks, the episode outlines how the firm sees these areas as connected, with merchant adoption and open technical tools reinforcing one another as the bitcoin ecosystem matures.