Electronic Currency

Electronic currency is also known as electronic money, electronic cash, digital money and else. It refers to money which exchanged only electronically. One of the relevant systems is called BitPass. BitPass is a prepaid account that allows everyone purchases digital content and services. It was a California corporation with headquarter in Silicon Valley and founded in December, 2002.

It was partnered with few major technology and financial companies such as Microsoft, PayPal and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Content buyer signed up for the service and put money into an account by using credit card or PayPal, and this stored-value amount could be used to purchase digital content or services.

On 19^th January, 2007 BitPass have sent mass of email to announce that they were shut down and operation officially closed on 26^th January. Any unspent monies should be spent within 7 days period. Later on, the remaining unspent monies were refunded by its partner, Digital River to respective account holder.

Although BitPass did not announce the reason, we normally presumed that it was due to cash flow problem. We noticed that BitPass has invested 13 million in 2004 but their business model had few takers only and its transaction volume never ramped to sustainable levels.

Referred link:

1.Wiki - BitPass (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitpass)

2.BitPass.Dead Pool. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/19/bitpass-deadpool/)