ZipConf.com - Waiting for Confirmations About to Become A Thing of the Past

A consequence of Bitcoin's architecture has always been the risk, albeit tiny, of the zero confirmation double-spend.  As a result, most Bitcoin exchanges have made it a point of only accepting a deposit after the Bitcoin network has verified the transaction, with six confirmations being the accepted standard. Typically, wait times are on the order of an hour to complete a deposit to an exchange.

Addressing the problem, ZipConf.com is rolling out a service to eliminate this delay, thus making Bitcoin an even more efficient means of moving your money.


"ZipConf acts as clearing house to provide instant credit to its clients and partners while assuming the risk associated with zero confirmation transactions," says Jonathan Ryan Owens, ZipConf's founder.

Obvious potential customers include those interested in conducting arbitrage trading between exchanges, where previously the hour-long delays associated with moving Bitcoins added a potentially expensive obstacle to the process. Consequently, you can anticipate a leveling in Bitcoin valuations across exchanges once ZipConf is operational.

After months of testing, Jonathan Ryan Owens says the API used to integrate his service with ZipConf's partners is ready to go. Once a site is integrated with ZipConf, it can allow its users to withdraw their funds instantly to a Bitcoin exchange, making the conversion of Bitcoins to fiat currency near-instantaneous. While sites like BitInstant have done a fantastic job in facilitating the conversion of fiat to Bitcoin, this is the first time that the Bitcoin to fiat path has been streamlined.

In developing ZipConf, great effort has gone into monitoring the Bitcoin network to log invalid transaction attempts and orphan transactions, ensuring the service has a complete picture of what's going on with the Bitcoin network at any given time. They've even been attempting double spends through various means to ensure they know what to look for when their service is operating.

Explains Owens, "The way we've built our platform is with two things in mind: security, and scalability. If we have to scale to supporting larger volume, we can do that with very little effort, as we've built the system in such a way (our monthly IT cost for multiple VPS alone is over $200) that we're ready to expand rapidly, and as such we'll be partnering and providing integration information (API documentation, support) to as many partners as possible, as quickly as possible."

Catering to traders and other users that require speed in their transactions, fees will start at 0.75% for individuals with the intent of reducing them as volume increases. "We hope to be able to reduce fees as low as 0.4% in the near future, once the volume is there," says Owens.

A key element to ZipConf's strategy is to ensure miners rapidly accept and propagate its transactions.  Of course, a little incentive never hurts, therefore ZipConf will be paying significantly higher than typical transaction fees to miners that include its transactions in their blocks.  For example, a 100 BTC transaction will net a pool or miner 0.07 BTC (or $0.35 at today's exchange rate), significantly higher than the 0.0005 BTC enforced by the standard client.

ZipConf's profits will go toward other Bitcoin projects which are currently under development. "We haven't put much out there into Bitcoin," adds Owens, "but we have been spending a lot of time tooling up to be able to rapidly develop and introduce services from here on out, so keep your eyes open - this is just the first of hopefully many useful services we'll be putting out."

The site is currently in private beta with intentions to step up to a public beta come Friday, May 4th.