"Dear Justino:
The Bitcoin network has been seeing record transaction volume in the last few weeks. This growth has also led to record network congestion and record-high bitcoin miner fees.
Miner fees are now more than $30 per transaction on average. To protect purchasers and to continue to offer service for Bitcoin payments, we are now requiring a new invoice minimum payment amount of $100 on all BitPay invoices.
Why BitPay is raising the invoice minimum to $100
Bitcoin miner fees are the costs to purchasers for sending Bitcoin transactions. BitPay also pays these costs as an operational cost for sweeping and processing payments received to BitPay invoices.
With current bitcoin network conditions, transactions sent without large miner fees are at high risk of significant payment delays or payment failures. This has meant that bitcoin payments under $100 are quickly becoming impractical for users to send and for BitPay to process.
We will continue to evaluate Bitcoin network conditions. If bitcoin miner fees continue to grow at this accelerated rate, we may increase invoice minimums again in the coming weeks. We will work to give you as much advance notice as possible.
What this means for you
If a customer attempts to submit an order smaller than $100 in USD value, the BitPay API will now return an error message to your system preventing invoice creation. No payment will be possible.
Below is the JSON-encoded error message which BitPay will return to your system if a customer attempts to create an invoice which is below our minimum:
{ error: 'Invoice price must be at least $100 USD' }
If the customer wishes to pay for an item less than $100, they will need to use an alternative payment method.
What's going to happen to smaller bitcoin payments?
We are observing Bitcoin network conditions constantly. If network capacity increases or miner fee levels go down, we will evaluate lowering our invoice minimum again.
We are also working quickly to add support for a Bitcoin Cash (BCH) payment option on all BitPay invoices. Bitcoin Cash is a modified fork of Bitcoin which will allow your customers to send payments with significantly lower bitcoin miner fees. Bitcoin Cash payments will allow us to re-enable payments as small as $1 or smaller. "