Why Bitcoin Is No Longer King of Cryptos for Payments

CoinPayments CEO, Sean Mackay, was interviewed by David Lin, host of the David Lin Report on 21st April 2023. In this interview, Sean talks about why Bitcoin is no longer king of cryptos for payments and why its usage is being surpassed by stablecoins. He goes on to share his views on the future of crypto adoption.

This is an extract of some of the key questions posed by David to Sean.

Sean: There are many parts of the world where big players like eBay and Amazon aren’t yet established and crypto can be a great solution. We started off servicing the e-commerce space and the different types of markets within it, where some have been quicker to embrace it than others. The types of customers that have crypto and want to use it to pay typically started out more on the tech side along with the merchants who sold those services. Gradually, it expanded to more mainstream types of retail sales. Our focus now is on platforms who have thousands or even millions of users. We offer an easy platform integration which enables crypto payments.

Sean: The traditional kind of payment system relies on what kind of banking or payment you’re using on the customer side, and the kind of banking and merchant service you’re using on the merchant side. There can be an element of fear when selling online and sometimes the banks don’t align so payments are rejected. This is especially true in the high-risk space where it’s hard for merchants to get a service from credit card companies. It makes sense to use cryptocurrency as it’s like a borderless payment solution where you’re basically just sending an amount of coin to an email address. It’s as simple as that.

Sean: In the last six months the volume has been trending down. I think it’s a general kind of outlook on the market and everything’s tightening up a bit. People would rather hold on to crypto than use it. We’ve gone slightly into a bear market crypto winter, but it feels like we’re coming out of that a little bit now – it’s definitely warming up.

Sean: It’s a bit of both upticks and downtrends of just our volumes in general. They’ve always correlated with the prices of crypto generally. When crypto prices are higher, people want to spend their crypto to get more value out of it and when prices are lower people want to hold on to it and wait for the price to come back. But now we’re also in a different kind of market environment with higher inflation and high interest rates. People are also currently risk averse.

Sean: Bitcoin is relatively new in the grand scheme of things as far as it actually being used in real life. In this respect, we haven’t quite got there yet if we talk about adoption as every person holding some balance of Bitcoin. When we do get there, as you know, there’s a limited supply of Bitcoin and everybody wanting to hold a little will cause the price to go up. However, it will settle somewhere in the future. I really don’t think it’s going to be this volatile forever.