Recently we got the chance to catch up with our old friends and neighbors HOSTKEY. HOSTKEY is a global internet service provider that offers colocation and other hosting services, leases top-of-the-line hardware like high-performance GPU servers, and offers 24/7 support from industry experts.

HOSTKEY is also a BitPay payments partner, allowing customers to pay invoices in Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Ripple and three dollar-pegged stablecoins.

But we knew them way before they were big.

And well... They knew us before we were big too.

As fate would have it, about a decade ago, HOSTKEY and BitPay were fledgling tech startups that happened to lease office space in the same small building.

It was natural then, HOSTKEY cryptocurrency specialist Joël Happé told us when we visited their Amsterdam office, that when customers started asking for a cryptocurrency payment option for HOSTKEY invoices, they knew just who to call.

Joël said BitPay has allowed HOSTKEY to accept cryptocurrency payments from customers around the world, while keeping regulations in mind.

Jeroen de Bie, HOSTKEY’s CFO, reminisced on our visit:

“We were both companies dreaming of making it big, and now we are both global players. We’ve had a connection with BitPay from the start.”

In the ten years or so since we were neighbors, HOSTKEY has built headquarters in Moscow and Amsterdam, partnered with Microsoft, Huawei, Webair and more, and now offers competitively-priced colocation services, equipment leasing and reliable cloud solutions for clients across Europe, Russia and North America.

During the same time, BitPay built headquarters in North America, Europe, and South America and become the global leader in blockchain payments, processing more than a billion dollars in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency payments annually for companies like Microsoft, Apmex, the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, and many more.

We've both come a long way, indeed.

We put together a short video from our visit where you can hear more about what BitPay brings to HOSTKEY as a payments partner, as well as more about each company's journeys from tech startup to industry leader.

Take a couple minutes and view the video here!

Updated: 10/05/2021