Bitcoin value lately continues its highly upwardly mobile trajectory as over the last 24 hours the bids on MtGox for the currency has elevated from $365 to $425.

In the Bitcoin community, new opportunities are opening up as others are closing down. Right now, Bitmit is showing all signs of shutting its doors—closing out all of its auctions and allowing users to withdraw their accounts—but at the same time assures customers that the company is simply transitioning hands. Further news about Chinese exchange GBL has surfaced after the BTC startup turned out to be a fraud and vanished like a faked office from Leverage.

Also in big news: popular e-commerce site Shopify made bitcoin capability available to over 70,000 merchants.

Bitmit is closing so another company can take it over

In a surprise e-mail, Bitcoin’s answer to eBay Bitmit.net announced to customers that it would be shutting down and closing its doors in anticipation of a takeover by another company.

Bitmit is shutting down its services / acquired by another company in two weeks. Please complete your orders and withdraw your funds asap!

[…]

We are planning to let another company take over Bitmit. Meanwhile we deactivated the site to let you withdraw your funds & complete your orders. The chances are good that Bitmit will be continued.

The announcement appeared on the website Nov 6 and an e-mail went out a few days later. With only two weeks to the apparent acquisition the site is permitting users to close out their orders and withdraw funds before that date. Little other news is available on the sale or the company buying.

In the past, Bitmit has seen some rough tides but generally seemed to come out on top. Arriving on the scene early 2012, Bitmit provided the only-of-its-kind Bitcoin auction house and began trading during cold winter’s days. It even spawned thoughts about how bitcoins could be used to replace the ubiquitous use of microtransaction currencies for mobile apps and video games—being that World of Warcraft gold could be found on Bitmit for bitcoins.

As 2012 wore on Bitmit suffered some long outages, and even almost went on sale (and out of business) during October 2012.

Apparantly those days are over and Bitmit is now officially changing hands.

Chinese Bitcoin exchange vanishes

GBL, a Chinese exchange has vanished without a trace sometime around October 26, 2013. Taking with it approximately $4.1m in user’s funds. There is no news as to how many bitcoins might have been taken by the apparent scammers—just the money put in by would-be investors.

The launch of GBL appears to have happened sometime in May 2013 with the registration of btc-glb.com and a post on Bitcoin Talk forums from a user named Zhaoxianpeng. Even the initial forays of GBL had been met with suspicion by many users—and a moderator on Bitcoin Talk quickly marked the thread with a potential scam warning–but in the end the exchange still netted 1,000 mainland investors in the venture.

Of course, the scam would eventually come to fruition late October and everything about GBL would unravel. CoinDesk describes the fashion in which the façade fell as a “a patchwork of information lifted from other websites” as curious users noted the lack of straightforward contact information, the offices that didn’t exist, and no way of actually determining who ran the site.

Hong Kong police are on the case.

This comes right on the heels of a recent surge of interest in BTC in the Chinese market that has been driving bitcoin value into the highest values in history. A much more legitimate exchange, BTC China (cited in last week’s Bitcoin Weekly) has seen volumes skyrocket and it continues to stay high on the horse.

Shopify adds support for Bitcoin

If this column still listed recent businesses to take BTC as payment, then this news item would break the word count limit. Popular e-commerce platform Shopify has recently added bitcoins as a possible payment source to its 70,000+ merchants making this the largest number of new merchants to enter the Bitcoin economy at one go ever.

Shopify representative, Brian Alkerton, posted on the customer forums to speak about availability via well-known payment processor BitPay:

Just a quick update on this: our Bitpay integration is feature-complete and can be added to your store now. Due to the fact that it’s a very new feature and not something we’re ready to roll out to all stores just yet, you will need to contact me to have it enabled, and I may want to follow up with you for your feedback once you’ve been using it for a while, but it works. When active, Bitpay will appear as a credit card processor in the Checkout page of your shop admin – enter your access key and you’ll be all set to go.

He added that as payments through BitPay will act similar to other credit card processors it’s not possible to use it “in conjunction with Authorize.net, Stripe, or other credit card processors.” However, PayPal Express Checkout can be used as secondary option.

Shopify merchants will have to ask for activation of this option in order to bring it online. So while that 70,000 merchants number looks daunting (and amazing) the depth of activation may not yet be that great as of yet.

As it turns out, Shopify has a somewhat functional system for adding different processors so BitPay isn’t the only bitcoin payment solution that can be had—and there are tutorials as to fitting BIPS and Bitcredits.io—however due to internal support, the BitPay solution will likely win out for merchants.