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 electronic wallet software to consumers and provided software to merchants to accept credit card payments. Later they also offered "CyberCoin", a micropayment system modeled after the NetBill research project at Carnegie Mellon University, which they later licensed. Despite a trial with ESPN.com, CyberCoin never took off, and the focus remained on providing software for consumers and merchants to process credit card payments.

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 another online credit card processing company, ICVerify. In January 2000, a teenage Russian hacker nicknamed "Maxus" announced he had cracked CyberCash's ICVerify application; the company denied this.

On January 1, 2000, CyberCash fell victim to the Y2K Bug, causing double recording of credit card payments through their system.

The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on March 11 2001 and its assets and name were acquired by VeriSign a couple of months later. PayPal acquired VeriSign's payment services, including Cybercash..

See also

• E-commerce
• Electronic money
• Micropayment

External links

• http://www.cybercash.com/ (PayPal Merchant Services)
• CyberCash opens Net to small change (News.com, September 30, 1996)
• CyberCash moves to thin wallet (News.com, August 20, 1998)
• Cybercash Disputes Hacker's Claim (Internet News, January 11, 2000)

References