Echo Bridge Teams up with Bitcoin Bay to Teach Small Businesses About Bitcoin
We’re excited to announce that Echo Bridge is sponsoring the upcoming Bitcoin Bay "Bitcoin Business Workshop" in Tampa, FL on April 23, 2023.
This event is the perfect opportunity for small businesses to learn how to operate on a Bitcoin standard, including how to receive payments from customers, pay employees and vendors, and implement best accounting practices.
If you're a business owner looking to stay ahead of the curve and take advantage of the latest trends, this workshop is a must-attend event. Register now through the link provided and we'll see you there!
Our first sponsored event!
As we continue our journey to be one of the first independent animation studios in the US to adopt Bitcoin, it’s lead us down some very interesting paths and meeting even more interesting people.
This month, Echo Bridge is happy to announce our sponsorship of the FIRST local Bitcoin only meetup in our area: the Downtown St Pete Bitcoin Meetup.
The meetup is focused on building a local Bitcoin economy by helping individuals and businesses learn more about how to use and accept Bitcoin in their day to day.
Guest speaker will be Andrew Begin of Galoy Money, the team responsible for helping to establish Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador, who will be sharing the lessons learned from helping to build the worlds first circular Bitcoin economy.
Purchase Bitcoin at one of the local Bitcoin ATMs or at the Meetup and get ready to use your Bitcoin to buy food and/or drinks on site!
Hope to see you there.
Click here to register.
A Quick Bitcoin Guide
Since we adopted Bitcoin into our business in 2021, more and more people have been asking us about it.
As one of the first animation studios to adopt Bitcoin, we thought it beneficial to put together a quick guide on Bitcoin, from its origin story, the Lightning Network, and of course how to use Bitcoin which you can find right here.
Are we, at Echo Bridge, a little obsessed with Bitcoin?
Yes.
Yes we are.
It’s still early days, but in the long run we believe it’s one of the best financial tools in the market today which can help the global animation industry for the better.
How to Price a Project In Bitcoin
Illustration by Esteban Valdez
You’re interested in using Bitcoin to pay for a project, but you’r not sure where to start.
It’s a lot easier than you think and we’ll show you how.
The two ways to use Bitcoin
From our experience, we’ve found (for the time being) two ways to interact with Bitcoin. You can use it either as a payment platform or as the medium of exchange.
As a payment platform
You treat Bitcoin similar to PayPal, Venmo, Cash App or any other payment platform to send funds.
In fact, it’s much simpler, faster, private, more secure and accessible than the payment platforms mentioned above.
All you and the party you’re doing business with need are Bitcoin wallets.
From there, once you’ve received your invoice, you simply send your coins to the specified wallet address (make sure you verify), set your transaction fee, send it and your done.
The receiving party will get the funds — depending on your transaction fee within minutes or seconds if you’re using the Lightning Network — and then it will be up to the receiving party as to whether they want to exchange it for fiat currency or hold it as Bitcoin.
As a medium of exchange
Now this is where it gets interesting…
Instead of doing the above where you have the set price in fiat then use Bitcoin as the payment platform, you set the price of goods and services in Bitcoin and you settle the payment in Bitcoin.
How to set the price in Bitcoin
Finding the price point is rather simple; you take the fiat price of the good or service you’re looking to obtain and divide it by the price of Bitcoin.
For example:
If a 45 second commercial costs 50,000 USD, you divide the fiat price by the price of Bitcoin (which at the time of writing is 36,302.41 USD), the price in Bitcoin comes to 1.37731903 BTC, or round it up to1.4 BTC to include transaction fees and make the accounting a lot simpler.
Now you have a rough estimate of what it will cost in terms of Bitcoin.
Step 1 - Negotiate the Exchange Rate
You and the party you are doing business with should come to a fair and reasonable exchange rate.
An example would be both parties agree that a 36,000 USD price point (302.41 USD below market) for Bitcoin is a fair exchange rate, it would be reflected in agreement as such.
Step 2 - Lock in the rate
In the event the project costs 50,000 USD, with a 36,000 USD per Bitcoin exchange rate, the agreed upon price for the goods or services would be 1.4 BTC.
Now, in order for this to work the price of goods and services on the side of the merchant/service provider would also need to be priced in Bitcoin rather than fiat, and some of the contractors, vendors, freelancers and other merchants involved would accept the Bitcoin rate as well.
Pricing the goods and services in Bitcoin locks in the rate and removes volatility.
Step 3 - Pay in Bitcoin
Paying with Bitcoin is as simple as sending a text.
You’ll receive an invoice which contains a QR code and a Bitcoin wallet address.
Scan, pay and done.
The benefits of using Bitcoin
Let’s look at the pros and cons of using Bitcoin as the medium of exchange and see if it makes sense to do so.
Remember, we’ve set the price in Bitcoin and not fiat.
The pros
If you got in early and you’ve seen massive price appreciation and want to use your Bitcoin; now you can.
When you price something in Bitcoin you’ve removed the volatility as what you’re transacting in is the currency itself.
You can transact with Bitcoin anywhere, anytime, with anyone in the world fast, securely and privately and knowing that there is cash finality in minutes not days, weeks or months.
If you’re transacting with the Lightning Network, you can send and settle payments in seconds.
If you didn’t get in early and want to get into the Bitcoin ecosystem, 50% or 80% price drops are a great way to get Bitcoin on sale.
The cons
Funds are immutable, meaning once sent there’s no reversing the transaction.
You accidentally send it to the wrong address, it could be gone forever.
You are fully responsible for your coins; there is no customer service or 1-800 to call if something goes wrong.
Finding places to use Bitcoin directly are few, but not far between as the numbers of merchants and retailers are growing.
Creating a Win-Win transaction
For the producer, accepting Bitcoin as payment is a way of getting a renewed sense of value to the goods and services they provide.
For the customer, you’re looking for value and it causes you to seek out those businesses who you believe will do their best to provide you with quality goods and services that you’re paying for.
Why use Bitcoin?
What gives something value isn’t the fiat price, rather, what we believe the value that something should be.
Yes, hodlin’ is a great way to save, no one is arguing against that, but in addition to being saved, as bitcoin gets used more and more the value of a bitcoin grows more and more over time.
There will ever only be 21 million bitcoin (or 2,100,000,000,000,000 satoshis) and those who transact with Bitcoin realize it and have the tend to be more mindful of where they put there money; businesses know this and need to compete to earn it.
Plus, as an early adopter of this emerging asset; you automatically get cool-kids points for doing it.
In conclusion
It’s a radical idea, probably ahead of its time… or is it?
We live in the digital age, connected globally through the internet; it only makes sense for us to conduct business in a manner that reflects the times we live in and to bring the concept of fair and true value to what we do.
If anything, hopefully this article got you to see the potential.
But before you go…
Get 12% off when you pay in Bitcoin!
To celebrate our 12th anniversary and for a limited time we’re offering a 12% discount on projects that are paid for in Bitcoin.
Contact us to learn more.
Paid In Bitcoin
Happy to announce we paid out in Bitcoin!
Over the summer, we made an announcement that we would be accepting Bitcoin as a payment method for our production services. The news was met with a lot of curiosity from our clients, partners and vendors. We made the decision to publicly announce Bitcoin acceptance after a couple of projects had opted to pay with it earlier on. We were very excited.
Then, in November, we made the announcement that we’d start issuing payment in Bitcoin to our employees, contractors and vendors who wanted to accept it as their payment.
Today, we’re happy to share the news of our first payments made to those individuals using Bitcoin.
Our experience
The process is very straightforward. Exchanged dollars for bitcoin, then store it in a wallet. In our case, it’s using an institutional custodian for our holdings via multi-signatures, then the payments were sent out to the payee’s bitcoin wallet directly. Some opted for on-chain (meaning the original 10+ minutes of bitcoin processing) and others opted for Lightning payments (Lightning Network is a second layer solution to make payments faster with incredibly small fees).
The overall process was faster and more secure than a bank-to-bank transfer or a PayPal payment.
To manage the volatility
We made it a plan to make regular weekly exchanges (known as dollar cost averaging) in order to take advantages of dips in market price. Some weeks we bought more bitcoin, other weeks less, and while the dollar price may fluctuate, because you’re making regular exchanges, you’re managing the risk more effectively than exchanging everything all at once.
Future plans
We’re going to continue with this program throughout December and into the first quarter of 2022. We will also continue to maintain and grow our Bitcoin holdings on the balance sheet indefinitely.
Our short film, ATOM, will have its production budget priced in Bitcoin.
Starting in January, we’ll have prices for our services available in Bitcoin as well.
These are very exciting times for us as we continue to venture into the crypto space. We’re also happy to continue to be one of the first independent animation studios to continue to explore and innovate in the crypto space with the goal of helping to transform the way our industry conducts business all across the board.
First Independent Animation Studio to Go Bitcoin
Last year, we made a decision to plug Echo Bridge into the Bitcoin network.
We spent a year learning as much as we could about Bitcoin as a monetary network, a payment system and a store of value, holding it as a treasury asset, in addition to some of the technical aspects behind the asset from mining, handling a node, setting up a server and point of sale payment systems in order to accept Bitcoin as a means of payment.
This past summer, we announced that Echo Bridge now accepts Bitcoin payments for its production services work which has been met with a lot of interest from many of our clients.
We’re now happy to announce that Echo Bridge will be able to pay its employees, contractors and vendors in Bitcoin starting December of 2021.
Echo Bridge is a global studio, working with people from around the world, and Bitcoin being a global payment network just makes sense for us. We believe that Bitcoin is not only a great store of value, but a potentially great way to do business with each other as we’re able to exchange value for value.
We’re all excited about this new opportunity and look forward to working with you in the cryptoverse.
Now Accepting Bitcoin
Yep, you read that right! We're really excited to announce that we're currently accepting Bitcoin as a medium of exchange for animation production services.
Simply put: If you want to pay with crypto, you can.
Paying with crypto is faster, cheaper and more secure than a wire transfer. The peer-to-peer processing is a great way to settle payments without much fuss.
How it works:
If you have Bitcoin already and want to use it for payments, you can.
You’ll receive an invoice from and it’s as simple as scanning the QR code or copy/pasting the payment address into your wallet. Quick, easy, painless.
Will we accept other cryptocurrencies in the future?
At the moment, we're mostly focused on Bitcoin.
It's really exciting times for us here and we're looking forward to seeing how it all plays out.