Some news coming this evening from the BitPay camp. The Atlanta-based bitcoin processing company announced Thursday a new cryptographically-secure API that makes use of previously-announced authentication protocol BitAuth.
Without getting to specific (largely due to the fact that I am not a programmer/developer), BitPay’s new API offers a number of features that certainly sound like they are useful.
This includes the implementation of refunds to any bitcoin address (as opposed to requiring a BitPay account). here’s what BitPay has to say on the feature:
[blockquote style=”2″][The refund API] will allow all of our customers to initiate the refund process from within their applications, which we hope will lead to more smooth Bitcoin payment experiences for everyone, regardless of platform or wallet.[/blockquote]
The new API will also allow for the automation of submitting bitcoin bills, in addition to capability-based API access (which you can read more about here).
BitPay also says they are doing away with shared secrets in their blog post on the matter:
[blockquote style=”2″]Our primary goal with this new API implementation was to cryptographically secure interactions with BitPay, whether they be the processing of payments or updating of account information. Ideally, this security would be independent of that of SSL/TLS – that is, even if SSL were to be compromised, API requests could still be secured.[/blockquote]
And if the thought of a new API might scare you off, BitPay says that interacting with the new API “should feel very familiar,” and that it should also “exhibit extremely predictable behavior.”
To read BitPay’s full post on their new API, you can go ahead and follow this link.