The popular online booking service CheapAir has announced that after several months of searching for the appropriate processing for cryptocurrency payments, it will use BTCPayServer, an open source solution to avoid third party involvement as an intermediary. In April, CheapAir terminated the cooperation with Coinbase and planned to use the leading bitcoin-processing service BitPay.
Nevertheless, after CheapAir’s plans were announced, many representatives of the bitcoin community drew its attention to the fact that earlier BitPay, without any warning and discussions with the bitcoin developers, refused to support the standard scheme of showing payment requests to users, as described in BIP21. The BIP21 scheme is accepted by all wallets and service providers from 2012 and ensures that, regardless of the software, QR-codes and payment requests are created and interpreted in one standard way. This ensures maximum compatibility and interoperability of software and services in a decentralized network with open source.
BitPay also uses the dubious and not widely supported scheme BIP70, which was initially proposed in 2013 by Gavin Addressen and Mike Herne, who received notoriety due to the creation of so-called “black lists” of bitcoins.
CheapAir has officially confirmed that it is giving up BitPay services and instead will cooperate with BTCPayServer.
The CEO Jeff Klee also noted that CheapAir is not the only company that suffered from Coinbase’s actions and was forced to look for new solutions. Nevertheless, the company considers it very important to offer users the possibility of payment in cryptocurrency and in this regard also announced the creation of a special support service that will work exclusively with Bitcoin users.