TravelBybit chief executive Caleb Yeoh said the cryptocurrency was sparking excitement again with its price hovering around $A16,000 and a growing number of people looking to enter the system to effectively become their own bank.

Yeoh entered the system when the 1MDB scandal hit his home country of Malaysia and the country’s currency, the Ringgit, collapsed wiping out a significant amount of the nation’s wealth.

TravelBybit was created to leverage off the growing demand for crypto-currencies. It was last year awarded a grant last year by the Queensland Government and also raised about $3 million in venture capital.

“What we have to done is use it to develop an on-line travel platform and to create tourist routes all around Queensland where people can pay with crypto-currency,” Yeoh said.

“There’s a chain of merchants in some parts of regional Queensland where you can pay with crypto-currencies. The tourist really doesn’t have to touch Australian currency.”

Merchants can also use a software platform that immediately converts the crypto-currency into the Australian dollar.

“In the last five months we did about $2 million in flight bookings paid with Bitcoin and so we did some analysis to figure out who were these people.

“They are actually backpackers or maybe they are better known as digital nomads.’’

He said they were part of trend of people working remotely and across borders and not wanting to deal with bank accounts in different countries.

“You could work from Bali but you don’t want the hassle of having an Indonesian bank account,’’ Yeo said.

The deal with Expedia will allow TravelBybit to expand its horizons.

“We are just a small startup, we don’t have the breadth of hotels until now,” Yeoh said.

“We have signed an Expedia partnership so we now have access to all their inventory and so we can now sell Expedia products to digital currency users. It expands our offering a lot more.’’