Bithumb, a South Korean cryptocurrency exchange which handles more than $200 million in daily volumes, is launching a new payment platform according to a report in Bitcoin .com. This comes only a couple of weeks after the exchange partnered with major payment processing companies in South Korea and the US.
According to the report, the platform will be a peer to peer payment platform called SNS Pay. It will support Payments on social media. Bithumb said: "SNS Pay is a service that integrates support for sharing, billing, and marketing products registered on social media. In particular, [we are] implementing a system to allow payments with the same UI/UX and social media."
The purpose of the new service is to facilitate the purchase of goods directly from social media websites, so that customers won't search for them elsewhere before buying: “By utilizing SNS Pay [for] shopping on social media, the conversion rate leading to the actual purchase is expected to be significantly improved,” said a Bithumb official.
Bithumb has been busily expanding in its home country this year. In January it partnered with a major shopping centre to integrate cryptocurrency payments at the businesses within, and later signed a similar deal with a company which lists thousands of the country's hotels.
At the beginning of March it partnered with three kiosk manufacturers in a plan to give small businesses the option of accepting payment in cryptocurrency, and as part of the same deal announced that it will be setting up Bitcoin ATMs.
On the 26th of March, it announced a partnership with Korea Pay, a digital payment processing company that handles over 200 different franchises. Bithumb said at the time that its goal is to bring a cryptocurrency payment option to 8,000 physical locations by the end of 2018
It also partnered with American company BitPay. BitPay CCO Sonny Singh told CNBC that he expects cross-border payments between South Korea and the West to hit $200 billion this year, partly as a result of this deal.
