Tanya Abrosimova
Independent Analyst
- The South African online payments provider no longer supports Bitcoin as a means of payment.
- The company cites high fees and slow processing as the main reasons behind the decision.
PayFast, the South African online payments provider, stopped accepting bitcoin as a payment method citing several limitations that make it useless as a means of payment.
“We have tried various ways to mitigate these problems, but unfortunately, these issues are fundamental. The resultant poor user experience has led us to re-evaluate bitcoin as a payment method on our platform and a decision has been taken to discontinue support for bitcoin from midnight on 20 July 2019,” the company explained.
It is worth noting, that, PayFast was the only South African payment solution provider that allowed bitcoin as a payment method. However, PayFast was disappointed by some inefficiencies like high transaction fees and long confirmation times.
The company noted that Bitcoin was supposed to become global money that would allow for a faster and cheaper way to spend money on the Internet. Though in reality, it cannot deliver on the promise.
The company explained that if the transaction was not confirmed in 10 minutes, the payment was deemed unsuccessful and the customer received a refund.
“As bitcoin has grown in popularity, it has become increasingly difficult for the network to sufficiently confirm transactions within the 10-minute time limit. Since the network isn’t able to handle the volume of instructions at speed required, the majority of bitcoin transactions on the PayFast platform ended up being unsuccessful.”
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