World’s First Company to Sell Shares for Bitcoins

Warszawa, Poland, October 23, 2014 --(PR.com)-- A Polish company, InPay S.A., is the first in the world whose shares are available for purchase in public offering using the digital currency Bitcoin. The sale has just launched on the equity crowdfunding site Beesfund.com.

Equity crowdfunding is simply raising capital thanks to the online community. Unlike the reward-based crowdfunding, made popular by sites such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo or RocketHub, in equity crowdfunding people who are involved in financing the company receive personal shares.

Examples of sites which enable this type of capital acquisition include the American websites EquityNet and Fundable or the British Crowdcube. Thanks to these services companies have raised over 300 million dollars (source: EquityNet, Fundable and CrowdCube) in total. But up till now none of the leading platforms had enabled the purchase of shares through Bitcoin.

This solution, in cooperation with InPay S.A., is proposed as a first by the Polish equity crowdfunding site Beesfund.com. Thanks to the Bitcoin payment integration system developed by InPay S.A., Beesfund is able to offer the purchase of equity from companies looking to raise capital.

InPay is the first such payment system in Central Europe. Up till now similar solutions on the continent had only been created in the UK, Sweden, Holland and Denmark. The most well-known, thanks to the investment of billionaire Richard Branson, an American company BitPay, which also has ambitious plans of conquering the European market by opening their Amsterdam branch.

Poland definitely stands out in comparison to the rest of Europe and the world in regards to the level of interest in Bitcoin and its practical applications.

Poland is in the global Top 10 in terms of regional interest of Google searches (last 30 days, source: Google Trends).

Is one of ten countries in the world with the highest number of Bitcoin wallet downloads (last full month, September).

Two out of the ten largest Bitcoin exchanges in Europe are Polish.

Krzysztof Piech, PhD, Warsaw School of Economics: “Indeed Poland has the opportunity to become a regional European leader in terms of solutions based on the Bitcoin protocol. Poland is able to take advantage of this competitive edge.”

Michał Kisiel, PhD, Economic University in Wroclaw: "Up till now payment innovations have been met with much demand on the Polish market. This is also the case with Bitcoin, whose applications don’t need to be limited to e-commerce. Combining digital currency with the social model of raising funds is an interesting experiment and a step towards a 'capital market 2.0,' which is decentralized and has low transaction costs."

Arkadiusz Osiak, chairman of the board of InPay S.A.: “In the world as a whole, mainly in the US around 60 venture capital investments have been made in companies linked to Bitcoin. The most recent examples, in Blockchain or Bitfury, have reached 30-40 million dollars. The subject of Bitcoin in both the USA and UK is taken more seriously than in Poland.”

Lech Wilczyński, CEO, co-founder, InPay S.A.: “Most people perceive Bitcoin only through the lens of its dynamically changing price, but it is a specific need, not a problem. Bitcoin protocol allows to provide quick and free flow of payment funds for company owners from buyer to seller, regardless of their location.”

Arkadiusz Regiec, CEO, Beesfund S.A.: “For crowdfunding platforms like Beesfund, Bitcoin seems to be the ideal engine for growth. It doesn’t limit buyers to specific acceptance areas like VISA or PayPal, it makes the whole purchase procedure much quicker and it lowers transaction costs.”

Public offering: https://crowdfunding.inpay.pl/en/