Bitcoin Briefs: KnCMiner, Baycoin Bazzar, Overstock, BitPay, Coinsetter & Hemingway

NEW YORK (InsideBitcoins) — Here are the latest items crossing the Inside Bitcoins news desk:

Mining manufacturer KnCMiner says its Titan Scrypt Miner has finished its first run in fabrication with wafers being sent to the next step: encapsulation. The company is awaiting completion and the arrival of the finished chips in Stockholm, Sweden, where they’ll move into the testing and assembly phase, for delivery. The Titan chip will use a PCB (board) with the same physical dimensions and footprint as the one utilized on their Neptune product, while requiring substantially lower wattage. It is also delivered using a new modular design system.

Bay Coin, LLC today announced the first-ever bitcoin marketplace app Bitcoin Bazzar Local, available on both the iTunes App Store and Google Play. Buyers and sellers from the same neighborhood can easily find each other using the built-in location service, and get the deal done in person. Primarily developed for the safety and convenience of cash payments, Bitcoin Bazzar does not handle fiat currency and also supports non-cash transactions.

Overstock.com expects sales paid with bitcoin will add 4 cents per share to its earnings this year, according to Reuters. The national retailer began accepting the digital currency in January and has already logged more than $2 million in sales. CEO Patrick Byrne expects bitcoin sales to total $6-$8 million by the end of the year – mostly from new customers.

BitPay, the world leader in business solutions for the bitcoin digital currency, has expanded its San Francisco office with several new hires.  As part of the recent growth, the company has named Sonny Singh as its Chief Commercial Officer to oversee all sales operations.  With over 15 years of experience in helping to grow tech companies, Sonny will be responsible for increasing BitPay’s customer base of over 40,000 merchants.

BitPay has also selected Steve Pratt to serve as Director of Business Development. Pratt formerly worked at VISA for 21 years as a vice president in the healthcare markets industry. The company has also added Gregg Zigler as a Senior Software Engineer.  Gregg has spent 10 years working on PayPal’s foreign exchange architecture.

Worldwide, BitPay has grown to over 60 employees and has also hired Pierre Rochard, Hamish Eisler, Christopher Jeffrey, Jason Massey, Emily Vaughn, Andrew Mandel, Corey Glaze, Braydon Fuller, Ashley Wheeler, Ryan Foran, Alan Stoll and Josh Estes.

Coinsetter, Wall Street’s low latency bitcoin exchange and ECN, today announced the release of its institutional FIX API. With the announcement, Coinsetter becomes the very first bitcoin company to launch a FIX API, a widely-used electronic communications protocol for financial transactions.

With the introduction of its FIX 4.4 API, Coinsetter allows customers to connect their existing trading systems to a consolidated source of bitcoin liquidity. Traders utilizing Coinsetter’s FIX API are able to place and manage orders, as well as receive status notifications on these orders in milliseconds. The API also offers real-time, incremental market data updates (tick data) for Coinsetter’s full order book, an important tracking feature that is not available on any other bitcoin exchange. Subscribers receive notifications on every change in Coinsetter’s order book for thousands of price levels in real-time.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Andrew Hemingway is betting that Bitcoin could play a key part in New Hampshire’s economy, and he’s preparing a Bitcoin money bomb (or “BitBomb”) to help him win the state’s gubernatorial primary.

The BitBomb603 (New Hampshire’s area code is 603) will demonstrate the heretofore untapped political power of the digital currency community, especially in the light of the outcry over the State of New York’s recent BitLicense.

BitBomb603 will kicked off today and will finish 6 days and 3 minutes later on Wednesday, Aug. 20, at 6:06 p.m. Individual donors and corporations can each donate up to $5,000 per cycle ($10,000 if the donation includes both primary and general elections). Hemingway’s goal is to reach $100,000 USD. Those who make donations of 6.03 BTC or more will receive special recognition on Hemingway’s website (www.andrewhemingway.com) and Twitter feed (@AndrewHemingway).

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