Confirmo at 10 years: Learn our story!
In 2024, Confirmo celebrates its 10th anniversary. What started out as an experimental payment rails is today one of the most important players in the crypto payments industry. Take a trip down memory lane with us and learn how we got here!
Discovering Bitcoin
It all started with Dan Houška and Roman Valihrach meeting at the Prague School of Economics in the early 2000s. Before Bitcoin, Dan Houška and Roman Valihrach experimented with forex operations, and e-gold, a precursor to Bitcoin. E-gold enabled users to hold online assets denominated in gold. Some time after this technology was shut down due to its centralized nature, the two fresh graduates discovered the Bitcoin Whitepaper and quickly saw its potential. They started mining with ASICs and famously sold the first 50 BTC mined at market price of around $45 per coin.
Later, the two decided to build on top of the open-source protocol, creating the first European and second global crypto payment gateway bitcoinpay.com, later rebranded as Confirmo!
The duo travelled to the USA for Bitcoin 2013: The Future of Payments, where they exhibited with the payment gateway Bitcoinpay and the seeds of a project which would later become Coinmate, the first Czech Bitcoin and crypto exchange. The two companies would become interwoven entities and benefited from each other’s liquidity. As Roman says in this 2015 Cointelegraph interview,
When Mt. Gox crashed, we decided to build our own Bitcoin exchange market, so as not to be reliant on 3rd parties with cash flow.
It was in this year that the first Bitcoin events were taking place in Prague. This community included Trezor founders Marek Palatinus and Pavol Rusnák, General Bytes‘ Karel Kyovský, and the crew of Paralelní Polis, the iconic hackerspace and world-first Bitcoin café. This thriving community is still present and the Czech Republic is a driving force in the crypto industry to this day.
The founding year of 2014
What helped propel Bitcoinpay and Coinmate into existence was winning the second place in the Starcube incubator in 2014. The funds from this event helped Dan and Roman get set up after MT. Gox’s fall, enabling them build on top of the open-source Bitcoin protocol and fully do away with counterparty risk. The exchange-gateway combo proved very efficient for both projects.
The news quickly spread and the local community became our first customers. Back in the day when Bitcoin was still mostly an underground curiosity, the demand for crypto payments was minimal. However these beginnings helped us test and optimize our tech stack for the big things to come.
First growth and industry leaders
In 2016, Alza.cz, the largest CEE retailer, implemented Confirmo for their customers. This marked a turning point in both revenue and brand recognition, as Alza processes over $100M yearly, and Confirmo enables about 1% of payments made on their website. In 2017, our current COO Kryštof Korč joined the team, and in 2018 we partnered with Pražská plynárenská, which enabled their customers to pay their energy bills with crypto in another world first.
By the end of the decade, the company was steadily growing. Over 5000 merchants were using our services, our team was growing, and we processed over 1.2M USD. In the face of first congestions on Bitcoin’s mainnet, we added support for Litecoin in 2018 to offer the fastest available payment methods. Despite the dynamic growth of the crypto ecosystem, LTC remains one of our most popular payment methods to this day.
Around the time of the pandemic, our service saw growing interest, and so did the entire crypto industry. As Bitcoin reached its 2021 heights, we partnered with Pilulka, a publicly-traded Czech drugstore. These developments did not go unnoticed and 2022 led to a major development in the history of Confirmo and Coinmate.
The tempo picks up
Seeing the massive potential in the growing crypto industry, in 2022 the two companies received investment from MitonC, the crypto arm of the venture capital firm Miton, which boasts an impressive portfolio of some of the most promising Central European startups.
Thanks to this new impetus, Confirmo started focusing on outbound business development, and Anna Štrébl joined the team. After pulling off the amazing feat of in bringing in key players from the prop trading industry, she became CEO after a single year! With FTMO, Funding Pips and other leading trading platforms, Confirmo started to blossom.
After 8 years of a symbiotic relationship, Confirmo and Coinmate separated as entities and each became its own company. As both grew, Confirmo acquired more than enough liquidity for its operations, and freeing up the bandwidth enabled Coinmate to serve more exchange clients and streamline its tech stack. The separation has enabled both companies to thrive more than ever before, while both teams remain on great terms to this day.
Since 2022, Confirmo has seen amazing growth. Having partnered with leading forex and trading platforms, 2024 has been a historical year in terms of monthly processed volumes and transaction counts. Our team has grown almost 5x, processing over $40M in around 100.000 payments every month, making us the leading CEE crypto payments processor. Our efforts are now aimed at optimizing and scaling the functioning of our payment gateway, expanding our business into new geographies and verticals, and obtaining a MiCA licence.
The future has never been brighter
As crypto prices soar to all-time highs, America is poised for friendly regulation, and crypto is garnering global mainstream attention like never before. We expect the coming years to be a perfect storm for Confirmo and the entire industry. We are excited to see Bitcoin break the major psychological barrier of $100.000, and this may well be the beginning of a new phase of the web3 revolution.
Although the world and crypto industry have changed enormously since Confirmo’s founding, our mission hasn’t changed in ten years: to get crypto payments into every business. Bite into this exciting future with us!
