Bitcoin company Nydig has acquired social media-focused micropayments app Bottlepay.
Built on the Lightning Network, the Bottlepay app aims to faciliate social, streaming, and micropayments by offering real-time funds transfer in bitcoin and conventional currencies and integration with popular social media platforms.
Launched across European markets in 2019, Bottlepay in February raised £11 million in a seed funding round backed by British fund manager Alan Howard, present and former Goldman Sachs partners, FinTech Collective and Nydig.
The acquisition will allow Nydig to integrate Bottlepay's Lightning Network infrastructure into its existing full-stack bitcoin platform, which enables financial institutions to provide crypto payments to retail customers.
"We believe that the next chapter of Bitcoin will be about Bitcoin - big B - the network," says Ross Stevens, founder and executive chairman of Nydig, and Robert Gutmann, co-founder and CEO, in a joint statement. "The Bottlepay team has built world-class infrastructure for Lightning and bitcoin payments, and they have done so with the same level of regulatory and compliance rigor that our customers expect from NYDIG today. NYDIG is on a mission to bring bitcoin to all, and this acquisition brings us one step closer to fulfilling that goal."
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.