A client in another country once spent four days trying to pay an invoice. The wire bounced between two correspondent banks, lost a chunk to fees, and arrived with a reference number that matched nothing on our side. Everyone was honest, the money existed, and the system still managed to turn a simple payment into a small project of its own.
That kind of friction is exactly the problem Bitcoin was designed to remove. So we are making it official: 137Foundry now accepts Bitcoin as payment for our work. If you would rather settle an invoice in BTC than push money through a chain of intermediaries, you can.
This post is the longer version of that announcement. It covers the reasons we think accepting Bitcoin is a sound decision, a short history of where Bitcoin came from, and a look at how we build apps that accept Bitcoin for clients who want the same capability in their own products.
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The short version: you can now pay us in Bitcoin
Nothing about how we scope or deliver work changes. You still get a fixed quote, a clear timeline, and the same delivery process. The only new thing is that "pay in Bitcoin" sits alongside the usual options at invoice time.
Under the hood we use a payment processor that locks in the exchange rate at the moment you pay, so neither of us is exposed to a price swing between the invoice being sent and the payment landing. You send BTC, we receive a settled payment, and the receipt reconciles cleanly against the invoice. If you want the technical detail on that, the second half of this post walks through it.
Why we decided to accept Bitcoin (the reasons that actually hold up)
Plenty of the noise around cryptocurrency is speculation and price charts. We are not interested in that part. The reasons we accept Bitcoin are practical and have more to do with how payments behave than with what a coin is worth on any given day.
Settlement is final and fast
A traditional card or bank payment is a promise that can be reversed for weeks afterward. A confirmed Bitcoin transaction is settled. Once it has a few confirmations on the network, the payment is done in a way that does not quietly unwind later. For a services business that schedules work around incoming payments, finality is genuinely useful.
It is also fast in a relative sense. A cross-border wire can take days. A Bitcoin payment confirms in minutes for normal amounts, and the Lightning Network handles smaller payments in seconds. You can read the protocol basics on bitcoin.org if you want the primary source rather than a summary.
No chargebacks, fewer disputes
Card payments carry chargeback risk. A legitimate charge can be disputed long after the work is delivered, and the merchant carries the burden of proof. Bitcoin has no chargeback mechanism, because the network has no central authority that can claw a payment back.
That cuts both ways and we are honest about it. It removes a consumer protection that some buyers value. For agreed, invoiced work between two parties who already have a contract, though, removing the dispute lever removes a real source of risk and overhead.
It works across borders without a gatekeeper
This is the one that matters most for us. Roughly half of our inquiries come from outside our own country, and international payment is where the old system shows its age. Currency conversion, intermediary banks, holds for "review," and fees that nobody can predict in advance all add drag.
Bitcoin treats a payment from across the street and a payment from across the world the same way. There is no gatekeeper deciding whether a transaction is allowed to cross a border, and no correspondent bank taking a cut for passing it along.
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A hedge against payment friction
We are not telling anyone to hold their savings in BTC, and we do not run our business on speculation. Accepting Bitcoin is about giving clients another clean path to pay, especially the ones for whom the conventional rails are slow or expensive. Optionality is the benefit. Nobody is forced to use it, and the clients who want it now have it.
A short history of Bitcoin (so the option makes sense)
It helps to know what you are paying with. Bitcoin started as a nine-page paper published in late 2008 under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System." The goal was straightforward: let two parties send value directly without a trusted third party in the middle.
The network went live in January 2009 with the mining of the first block, known as the genesis block. Embedded in that first block was a line of text referencing a newspaper headline from that day about bank bailouts, a quiet comment on exactly the kind of system Bitcoin was meant to offer an alternative to.
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The early years were small and experimental. The often-told story of someone paying 10,000 BTC for two pizzas in 2010 is real, and it is a useful reminder that this started as a curiosity, not a financial product. Over the following years the network grew, survived plenty of volatility and doubt, and turned into the most widely recognized cryptocurrency in the world. For a fuller timeline, the history of Bitcoin entry on Wikipedia is a solid, well-sourced starting point.
The core design has stayed remarkably stable. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin, the supply schedule is fixed in the protocol, and the network has run continuously for over fifteen years. Whatever you think of the price, the system itself has proven durable, and that durability is part of why we are comfortable accepting it.
How we actually build apps that accept Bitcoin
This is where it gets interesting for the clients who do not just want to pay us in Bitcoin, but want their own product to accept it. Building crypto payments into an application is very doable today, and the right approach depends on how much control you want.
Option 1: a hosted payment processor
The fastest path is a hosted processor. Services like BitPay give you an API and a checkout flow, handle the wallet infrastructure, and can convert incoming Bitcoin to your local currency automatically so you never hold crypto on your books. You integrate against their API, listen for a confirmation webhook, and mark the order paid.
This is usually where we start for businesses that want to accept Bitcoin without becoming experts in it. Most of the work is the same kind of payment integration we do for any provider: a clean checkout, a reliable webhook handler, and careful reconciliation between what the processor reports and what your database thinks happened.
Option 2: self-hosted with BTCPay Server
For clients who want no middleman and no per-transaction processor fee, we build on BTCPay Server, an open-source, self-hosted payment system. You run it on your own infrastructure, payments go directly to your wallet, and no third party sits between you and your customers.
It is more setup and more responsibility, since you own the keys and the uptime. In exchange you get full control, lower ongoing cost, and no dependency on a company that could change its terms. We handle the deployment, the wallet configuration, and the integration into your existing application as part of our custom web development work.
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Lightning for small, fast payments
If your product needs small payments, on-chain Bitcoin is not ideal, because every transaction competes for block space and carries a network fee. The Lightning Network solves this. It is a second layer that settles tiny payments off-chain almost instantly and for a fraction of a cent, then settles the net result back to the main chain.
For things like content access, tipping, metered usage, or pay-per-call APIs, Lightning is the piece that makes Bitcoin actually practical. We build Lightning support in when the use case calls for small or frequent payments rather than occasional large ones.
What we handle so you do not have to
The hard parts of crypto payments are rarely the happy path. They are the edges: waiting for the right number of confirmations before releasing goods, handling a payment that arrives slightly under the invoiced amount, dealing with price movement between quote and payment, and reconciling webhooks so a dropped notification does not leave an order stuck. This is the same discipline our data integration and automation work depends on, applied to money.
"The trick with crypto payments is treating them like any other untrusted external system. You never mark an order paid because a webhook said so. You verify on-chain, you handle the under-payment and over-payment cases explicitly, and you make the whole thing idempotent so a retried notification can't double-credit anyone." - Dennis Traina, founder of 137Foundry
Is Bitcoin right for your project? An honest take
Not every product needs to accept Bitcoin, and we will tell you so if it does not fit. If your customers are not asking for it and your existing payment rails work fine, adding crypto is complexity for its own sake.
But there are clear cases where it earns its place. International customers who struggle with card payments, products serving regions with unreliable banking, businesses tired of chargeback fraud, and anything that needs small or instant payments are all strong candidates. If you fall into one of those, accepting Bitcoin stops being a novelty and starts being a competitive advantage.
The reason we feel qualified to build this for others is simple: we now run it ourselves. We are not recommending a payment method we have only read about. We accept Bitcoin, we handle the reconciliation and the edge cases on our own invoices, and we know where the rough spots are before they reach your customers.
Want to pay in Bitcoin or build it into your product?
If you are an existing or prospective client and you would rather pay in Bitcoin, just say so when we send your invoice and we will send BTC payment details instead.
If you want Bitcoin or Lightning payments built into your own application, that is squarely the kind of work we do. Take a look at what 137Foundry offers, or read a bit more about how we work and then get in touch. Accepting Bitcoin is a small change on our side and a genuinely useful option for the people who need it.
