Leading bitcoin payment processor BitPay has announced the deployment of advanced merchant risk mitigation feature to its full customer base for instant bitcoin transactions.

The company explained that while the bitcoin network prevents double-spend transactions from being added to the bitcoin blockchain, some attempted double-spend transactions that are broadcast can fool businesses into delivering a product before the transactions are fully confirmed by the network.

In order to mitigate this risk, BitPay offers an array of transaction speed options in its merchant dashboard, allowing merchants to choose the “confirmation risk level” they want to ship their goods:

• Low (6 confirmations)
   
• Medium (1 confirmation, our default setting for new merchants)
   
• High (0 confirmations)

Merchants opting for High transaction speed take on an elevated risk of fraud if these incoming transactions never confirm. BitPay offers a feature to its Enterprise customers which analyzes incoming transactions and determines if they have a higher-than-normal risk of not being confirmed. The higher-risk invoices are adjusted to a Medium transaction speed, while lower-risk payments proceed at High speed.

“We are excited to expand the availability of this feature to our full merchant base. For those merchants that rely on BitPay's notifications to fulfill orders, this high-speed risk mitigation will provide an additional level of protection against fraudulent orders” BitPay said. “Our merchants will still have the option to take on the risk of accepting high-risk payments with zero confirmations. By turning off our High Speed Risk Mitigation feature in their dashboards, merchants can accept all payments at High speed, regardless of their risk level.”