PayPal finally took off when they pivoted into their successful email money service. The formula is easy. You can send money to anyone all you need to know is their email address. As long as they are based in one of the blessed countries they can then either sign up for a paypal account or receive the money in an existing account.

BitCoin doesn’t rely on email addresses. Rather accounts are identified by long crypted strings known as addresses.

So what do you do if you want to send money to someone who doesn’t have a Bitcoin wallet and account yet?

Enter Coinapult

With Coinapult you don’t need to sign up at all. All you do is enter the email address of you and a recipient.

Coinapult then creates a new BitCoin address. You transfer the funds you want to send to this address using your BitCoin wallet.

Once Coinapult can confirm the payment they immediately send an email to your recipient. Who can follow a link and accept the payment. They provide a few handy links to new BitCoin users to make it easy to get started.

Once you follow the link you reach this screen, which allows you to transfer the funds to your own wallet.

API

Coinapult offers a simple API which makes it easy to send bitcoin to users of your site who don’t use BitCoin yet. This could be useful for a marketplace style application receiving payment in Bitcoin from one user and sending it to someone else who doesn’t necessarily have a bitcoin account yet.

You perform a HTTP request and receive the address to send to in return:

curl http://coinapult.com/api/send -F to=pelleb@gmail.com -F from=pelle@picomoney.com -F message=Hello

1HWnQULQXq2kCnKH5gdLrSfXxNwTFCViQJ±

They make money by charging 1% transaction fee for all api payments.

One thing to realize is that coinapult never has access to your own wallet, so if you integrate with them you do need some sort of server side wallet for sending funds.