ethnews.com
On Tuesday, March 19, Fortune 500 company Avnet, one of the biggest distributors of electronic components in the world, announced that its customers can pay for products and services using bitcoin or bitcoin cash.
To facilitate digital currency transactions, Avnet has partnered with the popular payment platform BitPay, which will be responsible for processing and verifying transactions. Through this collaboration, customers outside the US will be able to request that payments be made in digital currency, though these requests will be processed on a "country-by-country basis."
Sunny Trinh, vice president of demand creation at Avnet, said, "We're working with BitPay to facilitate secure blockchain payments for all types of customers so they can focus on developing their products, not how to pay for them. Whether it's Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash, we can handle it."
In the first month of accepting digital currency as a form of payment, Avnet says, "several multi-million-dollar cryptocurrency transactions" have already been processed. Avnet is also working with Bitcoin.com to develop a new hardware wallet to provide its customers with more security.
Avnet believes that its acceptance of bitcoin as a payment option will help customers get their ideas to the market "by enabling easier access to its unique end-to-end ecosystem of design, product, marketing and supply chain expertise at every stage of the product lifecycle."
Avnet has not been previously active in the blockchain and crypto space, but BitPay has been at the forefront of the crypto industry and crypto news – though not always for positive reasons. In November 2018, BitPay's Copay wallet was infected with malware used to access private keys and steal cryptocurrency. That same day, the state of Ohio announced it would leverage BitPay to allow business owners to pay taxes using cryptocurrency.