Having spent the last several months building some solid and impressive tech, BitScan is moving forward into a new phase in its development with its Love + Bitcoin programme. This is designed dramatically to lower the barrier to entry for merchants into crypto, allowing them to get started with a crypto-ready site with no upfront financial investment and no heavy IT overheads. Sound too good to be true? Read on.

Read also: Welcome to BitScan 

How do you go about kickstarting a revolution in digital currency? BitScan’s belief has always been that it’s the merchants who will be at the forefront of the crypto movement. Why? Because it makes sound economic sense to them, for several reasons:

• Near-zero transaction costs - in contrast to 2-5% on a credit card transaction.
• No chargebacks - eliminating fraud
• Fast transfers. No waiting three working days for a transaction to show up in your account.
• No banking relationship necessary - cutting bureaucracy and the hassle of getting started in a new market
• Opens global markets at a stroke.

There are benefits for customers, too, such as the same reduction in fraud and the chance to enjoy lower prices thanks to savings passed on from reduced transaction costs, but the case for merchants is extremely compelling. Gain merchant adoption and you build a solid foundation for a crypto economy, along with all the advertising and advocacy they bring.

'Love + Bitcoin': evangelists wanted

To get merchants on board, it makes sense to make the barrier as low as possible. The traditional model might involve asking them to pay for crypto integration for their site, but why make it any more expensive than necessary? That’s why BitScan is targeting the evangelists: activists who are connected, crypto-savvy and enthusiastic in their own areas.

These Agents will pay to licence the BitScan platform: a powerful suite of software that will let them roll out crypto-ready sites for any business they sign up. In return, they’ll receive a slice of the revenue generated by that site, as will BitScan. It’s win/win/win: the merchant gains a new global market and income stream, BitScan receives revenue for further development and support, and the Agent is rewarded in proportion to his or her success. Interests are aligned: if BitScan and its Agents can bring benefits to businesses, we’ll all do well.

‘If we can provide our agents with the tools and support to achieve this we'll have helped them secure a commercial foothold that can be further leveraged to build-out their bitcoin business and become a champion of whatever area or vertical they have selected,’ says BitScan’s CEO, Rob Wilson. ‘In a broader sense we will have been instrumental in facilitating a global, decentralised and anti-fragile network of local crypto-economy hubs which are, in our view, an essential prerequisite to mass-adoption of a flavour that would benefit humanity through differentiation with the existing paradigm, rather than one that simply seeks to emulate it.’

The great news is that despite just embarking on this new phase of our mission, BitScan is already looking at bringing on board its first two Agents - and we hope to add many more in the coming weeks and months. Further down the line we’ll be integrating our own loyalty token to reward everyone involved with the BitScan ecosystem, based on our BitTrust reputation system that is baked into the platform.

These are exciting times for BitScan and crypto as a whole. Stay tuned - we'll be bringing you more about BitScan's platform for merchants soon.