Leading Bitcoin Payment Processor Bitpay Joins Crypto Patent Alliance COPA

Bitpay, the world's largest cryptocurrency payment service provider, announced that it will join the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), a crypto patent organization founded by Square. Bitpay has been working on blockchain products since 2011, and the company will share open source projects and use a shared patent library with the crypto patent organization.

Atlanta-based cryptocurrency payments and blockchain company Bitpay will join forces with COPA, the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) originally founded by Square to support open access to patents and protection from patent threats.

On January 1, 2020, Coinbase, a San Francisco company that just went public on Nasdaq, also joined COPA. Stephen Pair, founder and CEO of Bitpay, believes that cooperation with COPA is a step towards innovation.

“Bitpay is partnering with and supporting COPA because we believe the blockchain space is at an inflection point where crypto is going mainstream, forever changing the way businesses and consumers receive and use money,” Pair explained in the announcement.

The Bitpay founder added:

“We are seeing both commercial and consumer adoption accelerate as COPA industry leaders work together to advance technology innovation and make blockchain easy for businesses and consumers to use.”

COPA Board Chairman: “We want to remove barriers to innovation”

The non-profit COPA is made up of companies such as Coinbase, Bitbank, Satoshi Labs, Ark.io, Blockchain Commons, Kraken, Stacks, Square, Microstrategy, and Stakenet. Anyone can join the corporate alliance and benefit from the patent alliance. "Organizations can join whether or not they own patents," COPA noted. COPA recognizes that cryptocurrency technology is built on the collaborative efforts of a community of developers, engineers, and designers.

“We want to remove barriers to innovation, rather than let patents stand in the way, and we welcome BitPay and their many contributions to the blockchain and payments space,” Kirupa Pushparaj, chair of the COPA board of directors, concluded in the announcement.

Just recently, COPA filed a civil lawsuit against Craig Wright, the self-proclaimed inventor of Bitcoin, over the ownership of the Bitcoin white paper.