CyberCash, Inc. was an
internet payment service for
electronic commerce, headquartered in
Reston, Virginia. It was founded in August 1994 by Daniel C. Lynch (who served as chairman), William N. Melton (who served as president and CEO, and later chairman),
Steve Crocker (Chief Technology Officer), and Bruce G. Wilson. The company initially provided an
online wallet
An online wallet is a software or web service that allows users to store and control their online shopping information, such as logging (computer security), logins, passwords, shipping Address (geography), address and credit card details. It also ...
software to consumers and provided software to merchants to accept
credit card
A credit card is a payment card issued to users (cardholders) to enable the cardholder to pay a merchant for goods and services based on the cardholder's accrued debt (i.e., promise to the card issuer to pay them for the amounts plus the o ...
payments. Later, they additionally offered "CyberCoin," a
micropayment
A micropayment is a financial transaction involving a very small sum of money and usually one that occurs online. A number of micropayment systems were proposed and developed in the mid-to-late 1990s, all of which were ultimately unsuccessful. A s ...
system modeled after the NetBill research project at
Carnegie Mellon University, which they later licensed.
At the time, the
U.S. government had a short-lived restriction on the export of
cryptography
Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adver ...
, making it illegal to provide encryption technology outside the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...
. CyberCash obtained an exemption from the
Department of State, which concluded that it would be easier to create encryption technology from scratch than to extract it out of Cyber-Cash's software.
In 1995, the company proposed RFC 1898, CyberCash Credit Card Protocol Version 0.8. The company went public on February 19, 1996, with the symbol "CYCH" and its shares rose 79% on the first day of trading. In 1998, CyberCash bought ICVerify, makers of computer-based credit card processing software, and in 1999 added another software company to their lineup, purchasing Tellan Software. In January 2000, a teenage Russian hacker nicknamed "Maxus" announced that he had cracked CyberCash's ICVerify application; the company denied this, stating that ICVerify was not even in use by the purportedly hacked organization.
On January 1, 2000, many users of CyberCash's ICVerify application fell victim to the
Y2K Bug, causing double recording of credit card payments through their system. Although CyberCash had already released a Y2K-compliant update to the software, many users had not installed it.
Bankruptcy
The company filed for
Chapter 11
Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code (Title 11 of the United States Code) permits reorganization under the bankruptcy laws of the United States. Such reorganization, known as Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is available to every business, wheth ...
bankruptcy on March 11, 2001.
VeriSign
Verisign Inc. is an American company based in Reston, Virginia, United States that operates a diverse array of network infrastructure, including two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers, the authoritative registry for the , , and gene ...
acquired the Cybercash assets (except for ICVerify) and name a couple of months later. On November 21, 2005
PayPal
PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper ...
(already an
eBay
eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became ...
company) acquired VeriSign's payment services, including Cybercash.
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See also
*
Digital currency
References
{{reflist
External links
CyberCash opens Net to small change(News.com, September 30, 1996)
(News.com, August 20, 1998)
Cybercash Disputes Hacker's Claim(Internet News, January 11, 2000)
Payment systems
Electronic funds transfer
Financial technology companies
Mobile payments
Online payments
Payment service providers
American companies established in 1994
Financial services companies established in 1994
1994 establishments in Virginia
Companies that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2001