Bitcoin had an extremely exciting month of March with the explosive growth of the value of the cryptocurrency—with it approaching and exceeding $140 in early April—and there’s so much news that there’s just not enough time to cover it in individual articles. Not to mention that March represented the first ever near-crisis for Bitcoin when a fork happened to the blockchain; an event that went largely unnoticed by the community due to how aptly it was smoothed out.

Bitcoin Value Approaches and Exceeds $140

It was in fact only late March when we last reported that Bitcoin had exceeded $70—March 20 to be exact—and now the value has doubled on the MtGox exchange. Speculation is high that the cryptocurrency is being bought into by ailing European Union countries such as Spain in the wake of changes to their economy and over the weekend, when the currency hit $100, SiliconANGLE’s editor-and-chief Mark Hopkins questioned when this meteoric bubble would burst.

The sudden jump in value is coupled with an equally sudden interest on Twitter and financial magazines in the currency. Not that it hasn’t been rolling around in the news media for most of 2013; but the great increase in value has given to a discussion on reddit asking about “Bitcoin Millionaires,” there certainly are people who bought into the currency when it was $3 in 2011 or $30 in 2012 who could now cash in for quite a bit.

BitPay Announces It Has Processed Over $5.2M in BTC Transactions in March

In what fits with the popular notice of Bitcoin in March, BitPay is announcing that they’ve had a surge in transactions putting them at a record volume. During the month of March, the pace for the processor accelerated with over $3M transactions in the final week with over 5,100 completed transactions for merchants—this is half-again BitPay’s total transactions as of late January.

This burst of popularity and transactions isn’t mere speculation in the BTC market—BitPay processes currency for merchants and service providers to exchange bitcoins for USD and other local money. The processor now has over 4,500 approved merchants using their service to exchange bitcoins for goods and services.

“Merchants are clearly appreciating the superior performance of our platform compared to all others in the marketplace,” says Tony Gallippi, co-founder and CEO of BitPay.  “Any merchant selling high-ticket items over the Internet needs to look at bitcoin. And with our recent reduction in fees, our merchants are using our all-inclusive 0.99% fee to offer discounts to their customers for paying in bitcoin.”

BitcoinStore Sells $500,000 and Renews Ingram Wholesale Contract

The biggest Bitcoin-only online retailer for electronics, BitcoinStore, has sold $500,000 worth of merchandise in the month of March allowing the retailer to renew its wholesale contract with Ingram.

The store officially launched on Feburary 27 offering extremely cheap prices for retail electronics due to the low overhead of accepting and processing BTC; but the contract with the wholesaler had a caveat: BitcoinStore needed to move $850,000 worth in the first quarter of 2013 in order to retain the contract. BitcoinMagazine has the full story, but the long-and-the-short of it is that BitcoinStore managed to move a noticeable amount in a small amount of time—although not quite the target amount.

However, due to the surge and obvious capability that BitcoinStore had shown (or the general popularity of Bitcoin) Ingram was obviously impressed.

The store currently offers retail electronics at a 0% markup, making it available at a surprising discount and BitcoinStore CEO Roger Ver says that he’s willing to take the hit seeing how times are good. During this time the electronic marketplace has also used a massive marketing campaign to bring in interested parties and Ver, a Bitcoin evangelist himself, sees it as a proof-of-concept that the currency has a real niche to be filled.

He’s even gone so far to release an open letter to online retailers including Amazon, Newgg, and Buy.com,

“So here’s the deal I want to make with each of you,” Ver writes, “accept Bitcoin payments by the end of 2013 and we’ll gladly close down our website. But if you don’t accept Bitcoin… we’ll keep rolling. We have already made over a half million in sales and we have only been open a month! If you don’t listen to your consumers, we’ll continue taking them from you. I assure you, Bitcoin is geeky enough to appeal to many of your consumers, and the savings we provide is convincing enough for many others. We’re a startup and we’re already regularly beating your prices, imagine what will happen as we grow bigger.”

Bubble or no—last month’s fork or no—Bitcoin is making waves and a real impact in the news media, social media, and is quickly becoming a fully functional currency. The first quarter of 2013 is barely over and things are looking interesting for the cryptocurrency. Be sure to keep up with our coverage on SiliconANGLE, this year is in for a ride.