Yesterday’s information about Microsoft no longer accepting payments in bitcoin has been removed for the website and called incorrect.
Bad news yesterday, good news today – Microsoft explains recent notification about termination of bitcoin payments acceptance as a ‘mistake’.
Just yesterday Microsoft website stated: “Microsoft Store doesn’t accept Bitcoin. You can no longer redeem Bitcoin into your account. Existing balances in your account will still be available for purchases from Microsoft Store, but can’t be refunded”.
Customers must have had enough time to get upset while today a company spokesperson has confirmed to Softpedia that Microsoft will continue to support Bitcoin in the Windows Store and provided some details: “We continue to support Bitcoin for adding money to your Microsoft Account which can be used for purchasing content in the Windows and Xbox stores. We apologize for inaccurate information that was inadvertently posted to a Microsoft site, which is currently being corrected.”
Microsoft users can still use the virtual currency to buy content in the Windows and Xbox stores.
Corporation doesn’t reveal how the mistake could happen. It also doesn’t share how many of its customers actually use the bitcoin payment option. By the way, the assumption that quite few customers choose to pay in bitcoin was one of the main possible reasons for now-outdated decision of Microsoft to stop accepting bitcoin.
The same source Softpedia stated that a small amount of bitcoin transactions might have been performed in the store. Thus, Microsoft must have seen no sense in keeping working with bitcoin. This was only an assumption, and rather debatable, taking into consideration the amount of venture capital invested into Bitcoin startups in 2015.
Microsoft added bitcoin as a payment option to purchase apps, games, and other digital content from the Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox Games, Xbox Music, and Xbox Video stores in December 2014.
This turned out to be a result of a partial integration with bitcoin processor BitPay, a Georgia-based bitcoin processor founded in 2011 by Antonio Gallippi and Stephen Pair. Microsoft has become the world’s largest company to accept Bitcoin payments – the company had $86.8 billion in annual revenue and a market cap of more than $380 Billion.
The very beginning of March brought Microsoft two promising partnerships. It teamed up with AlphaPoint and IOTA . The companies became the first partners of Microsoft in Azure Blockchain as a Service.
Since Azure Blockchain was announced as a Service with the first offering of the Ethereum Platform with ConsenSys, it has got great response from customers and partners. According to Marley Gray, director and strategist from the Microsoft Center of Excellence for Financial Services, “Ethereum Blockchain as a Service provided by Microsoft Azure and ConsenSys allows for financial services customers and partners to play, learn, and fail fast at a low cost in a ready-made dev/test/production environment.”
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