GoCoin has announced that it has raised a seed round of over $550,000 in funding to bring to market the first truly open and international platform to facilitate the purchase of goods and services across the world bought with Bitcoin, the increasingly popular digital currency.

The seed funding comes from a list of connected, global investors from Silicon Valley, Silicon Beach, Asia and Europe, including former Facebook and Amazon executive Owen Van Natta and Ooma founder Andrew Frame.

GoCoin will begin its expansion as the first true payment processing service for Bitcoin with an initial focus on Asian and South American countries, where the challenges of accepting credit cards and purchasing goods and services online between even neighboring countries can be especially difficult. In terms of market verticals, GoCoin will initially focus on providing Bitcoin payment processing for e-commerce, digital content and interactive/social gaming companies.

Co-founder Steve Beauregard will serve as GoCoin's CEO, and gaming pioneer Brock Pierce will serve as chairman of the board. Over the past few months, the GoCoin team has been quietly developing its technology with engineers in Singapore, Argentina and the U.S. The company is currently in testing with its first merchants in private beta and plans to officially launch publicly in November.

'As digital currency becomes more pervasive, it's imperative that software developers have advanced tools to fully integrate a scalable digital currency payment system across the globe. Merchants should be able to accept not just Bitcoin, but also other digital currencies as those emerge. GoCoin is both easy to implement and inexpensive to operate,' said Steve Beauregard. 'Our team of seasoned e-commerce veterans has designed GoCoin so high-volume merchants with complex back-end requirements can securely accept digital currency payments without fear of their internal systems being compromised.'

'The future of currency is digital and the old payment systems used today were not designed for the Internet,' said Pierce. 'GoCoin will help Bitcoin go far beyond merchant acceptance; it will simplify cross-border commercial transactions.'