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Coupa Café Starts Accepting Bitcoin

If you work in Silicon Valley, you know of Coupa Café. It’s a coffee shop in Palo Alto where the typical patrons are tech startup entrepreneurs coding away on a Macbook Air while they sip a latte.

Now this trendy coffee shop is becoming a payments pioneer by accepting Bitcoin at the register.

“It’s like when the Internet first started in the ’90s,” said Mike Landau in an interview with Palo Alto Online. Landau is a Facebook software engineer who helped build the technology that enables Coupa Café to accept Bitcoins.

“Bitcoin does two things,” Landau explained. “One is, it’s a currency. But it’s also a medium of transaction. You can imagine it being kind of like PayPal, but completely open source and decentralized. There’s no one company that’s in charge.”

Coupa Café’s cash register rings up a sale in both dollars and Bitcoin. Customers who want to pay in Bitcoin can use an app called Blockchain to scan the cafe’s QR code and send BTC for payment.

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Winklevii Invest in BitInstant

“We’re definitely pretty fascinated by it. The classic issue with Bitcoin is that it’s very early days.” — Tyler Winklevoss

The WinkleVoss twins, the two Harvard graduates who sued Mark Zuckerberg over the creation of Facebook, have been getting into Bitcoins. First, it was learned that they own 1% of the Bitcoin economy, and today TechCrunch learned that the Winklevii have invested in BitInstant, a Bitcoin startup.

BitInstant, a New York City based startup that operates an online platform for buying and selling Bitcoins, has raised $1.5 million in a seed funding round led by Winklevoss Capital with the participation of other strategic investors including money services veteran David Azar. The investment was closed this past fall, but the Winklevosses are just now publicly announcing it in the lead-up to the Bitcoin Foundation’s 2013 Conference being held in Silicon Valley this weekend.

Via TechCrunch.

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