Mt. Gox is informing customers that OKPay, a long-time money-transfer partner with the Bitcoin exchange, will be suspending operations with Bitcoin-related exchanges. The Tokoyo-based exchange has published this news in a PDF online as a press release that makes it clear this change is immediate, but that customers who usually use OKPay for transfers will have a grace period to move their funds before the partnership is severed completely.

“Mt. Gox has recently been informed by OKPay, one of  our longtime partners, that they are planning to stop performing wire transfers to and from all Bitcoin exchanges, including Mt. Gox,” the exchange wrote in its press release on the subject citing several options for how current customers can deal with what’s about to happen before the gate closes.

• We will soon stop accepting deposits via OKPay. This may take up to a couple of weeks, but it will happen eventually.
• Withdrawals to OKPay accounts will not be cut immediately, but will only be allowed up to the amount that OKPay users have deposited into Mt. Gox via OKPay. Beyond that amount there are other methods of withdrawal available.

The BTC exchange have also published a notice on their Facebook page enabling customers to comment on this news.

Very little information has come from OKPay as to why the sudden change of heart; but almost all press from Mt. Gox has a positive upbeat spin to expectations.

News from OKPay is an extremely short news release in their blog posted yesterday that is literally one sentence: “Dear customers, we are currently suspending bitcoin processing.” SiliconANGLE has contacted OKPay for a comment on why the money service has stopped working with Bitcoin exchanges but there hasn’t been enough time for a comment, this article will be updated if there is a response.

On March 26 of 2012, OKPay began to do their own full-featured BTC processing that could allow users to “fund your OKPAY account with bitcoin, withdraw via bitcoin and use bitcoin as a payment option for purchases of goods and services.” This included instant conversion between numerous other world currencies as-well-as established processes for trading in BTC. From OKPay’s blog post this most certainly has ended and from Mt. Gox’s press release the payment processor has stopped working altogether with all Bitcoin exchanges.

That’s over a year of OKPay being part of the Bitcoin market.

As Bitcoin exchanges have grown, the number of methods for payments to and from them have always been somewhat limited.

Extremely popular Internet-based payment processors such as PayPal have largely been eschewed by the Bitcoin community, often for very good reasons, and most exchanges go through semi-rigorous processes of verifying the identity and reliability of money senders. In many cases, traders interested in involving themselves in BTC trading use Money Orders (on the light end of the spectrum) and bank wire-transfers for much larger transfers.

Dwolla has also been a fairly good solution for Mt. Gox until recently when the Department of Homeland Security sized and froze the exchange’s account. However, exchanges such as CampBX still work perfectly well with Dwolla. The loss of OKPay’s partnership shortly after the freeze of Mt. Gox’s Dwolla account will likely have an effect on the exchange–and it may not be for the best.