CyberCash, Inc ( Became PayPal) - Delaware 1996

Beautiful engraved RARE specimen certificate from the CyberCash dated in 1996. This historic document was printed by American Bank Note Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of the company's logo. This item has the printed signatures of the Company's President and Secretary and is over 11 years old. This is the first time we have had this for sale.


Certificate Vignette

CyberCash, Inc.

CyberCash, 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) and William N. Melton (who served as president and CEO, and later chairman). The company initially provided an electronic wallet software to consumers and provided software to merchants to accept credit card payments. Later they also offered "CyberCoin", a micropayment system modeled after the NetBill research project at Carnegie Mellon University, which they later licensed. Despite a trial with ESPN.com, CyberCoin never took off, and the focus remained on providing software for consumers and merchants to process credit card payments.

In 1995, the company proposed 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, CyberCash fell victim to the Y2K Bug, causing double recording of credit card payments through their system.

The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on March 11, 2001 and its assets and name were acquired by VeriSign a couple of months later.

PayPal acquired VeriSign's payment services, including Cybercash.

History from Wikipedia and OldCompanyResearch.com (old stock certificate research service).

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About Specimens

Specimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".

Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates we made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company.

These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that grown in popularity over the past several years.