Bolt buys Wyre Payments in effort to make key move into crypto

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Accelerated checkout company Bolt has acquired cryptocurrency infrastructure firm Wyre Payments.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but The Wall Street Journal reported it’s in the neighborhood of $1.5 billion.

Bolt is valued at around $11 billion and the deal would be the largest to date in the cryptocurrency space completed without a special purpose acquisition company.

Bolt is reportedly keen to integrate Wyre’s technology with its own online checkout service to allow its merchant clients to accept cryptocurrency in a simple, easy to use way.

The move could put pressure on others in the ecommerce space.

For example, Amazon doesn’t accept cryptocurrency as of April 2022 despite its growing popularity.

Shopify, which provides online store hosting along with payment processing and its own accelerated checkout platform, allows store owners to integrate with third-party alternative payment provider gateways to accept crypto, but does not have direct integration as of April 2022.

It also notably doesn’t work with Shop Pay, its accelerated checkout system.