Encouraging Results from BitWall & Chicago Sun-Times Partnership

In addition to roughly 960,000 consumer wallets and 23,000 merchants on the Coinbase platform, we also have over 4,000 applications that developers have built using the Coinbase API. It is no secret that the developer community is excited about bitcoin, and our API makes it easy for developers to build bitcoin apps.

One of the most promising companies built on our API is BitWall, a content monetization platform that enables publishers to accept bitcoin via paywall. On February 1st, BitWall powered a paywall for the Chicago Sun-Times, a 169-year old organization that is the 9th largest newspaper in the country. The Sun-Times became the first large media organization to experience the power of microtransactions using bitcoin and all proceeds from the initiative were donated to the Taproot Foundation.

Below are the results from the Feb 1st partnership:

• There were a total of 713 Bitcoin donations

• Donations amounts ranged from $0.01 to over $1,000.

• 63% of all donations were for $0.25,

• Each Tweet that was “Donated” led to 38 clicks (and new visitors to www.suntimes.com to see the promotion)

This is encouraging data and bodes well for the future of microtransactions. Congratulations to BitWall and the Sun-Times for a successful foray into the world of microtransactions!