CYBER CASH

Cyber Cash, 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 agree to credit card payments. Later they also offered "CyberCoin", a micropayment system modeled after the NetBill research project at Carnegie Mellon University, which they afterward licensed. Despite a trial with ESPN.com, CyberCoin never took off, and the focus stay behinded on providing software for consumers and merchants to process credit card payments.

In 1995, the company planned 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, Cyber Cash fell sufferer to the Y2K Bug, origin double recording of credit card payments during their system.

The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on March 11, 2001 and its property and name were obtained by VeriSign a couple of months later. PayPal obtain VeriSign's payment services including Cyber Cash.