Cooperativa RadioTaxi 3570, one of Italy’s largest taxi fleet, announced that it has started accepting bitcoin payments. Along with credit card, Bancomat, and PayPal, the company has listed bitcoin, under its ‘Payment methods’, bitcoin.com reported.

The company has partnered with Chainside, a startup enabling businesses to accept bitcoin, to offer wallet, invoice, and monitoring services. The Chainside platform is integrated into URI’s booking app for smartphones and tablets – IT Taxi – that is widely being used, including RadioTaxi 3570.

Customers who wish to pay through bitcoins after their trip can opt for bitcoin payments and will be redirected to a page on Chainside. Once payment is received, confirmation is sent back to IT Taxi.

Last year, RadioTaxi and Chainside co-hosted a hackathon for the industry in Rome – ‘TaxiHack’. It was the first hackathon for innovations dedicated to taxi service that saw BitTaxi, an app that allows customers to pay for rides in bitcoin, as the winner.

"Of course, to think that everyone can accept being paid in Bitcoin is hard to imagine, but what we want to walk from this initiative is that we are not as conservative and opposed to innovation as we often describe . We have always seen innovation as a growth stimulus. We want to give a strong signal to our competitors," the president of the cooperative Loreno Bittarelli commented after the event (loosely translated).