Sean Mackay, CoinPayments’ CEO, was interviewed by David Lin, anchor for Kitco News at the Future Blockchain Summit in Dubai this past October 2022. In this interview, Sean shares his expertise on the rising popularity of stablecoins, how he believes crypto can recover from the bear market and the most popular currencies that are being used for payments.
Below, we’ve extracted some of the most interesting topics from the interview.
‘To get us out of the current crypto winter, we’re looking at a couple of things: one is a new narrative and innovation in the space. This is great because winters are usually when devs get to work, and projects take off because there’s less focus on price volatility; for example, the crypto winter in 2018 brought about DeFi and NFTs. Hopefully, these innovations will coincide with Bitcoin halving in 2024. But ultimately it all depends on the macro conditions at that point; we’ve always been in a non-recessionary market when bull runs have gone on.’
‘The fact is, crypto and DeFi are new technologies, and we’re going to go through initial bumps. Eventually, we’ll come out on the other side. The benefits of what crypto can do are out there – borderless transactions in our globalising world are indispensable. And essentially, retail investors aren’t developers. They can’t review DeFi contracts, so they will eventually have to trust someone in the space to keep up with the times.’
‘CoinPayments has been around since 2013, and Bitcoin was the predominant coin people used to transact with. It represented about 80% of our payment volume, but recently it’s dropped to only 30%. Currently, what’s making up most of our payment volume are stablecoins. Stablecoins represent a way to interact with crypto but without volatility. Nowadays, if you’re a merchant, you don’t want to receive Bitcoin because if you receive a payment and then the value of the currency suddenly plummets, you’re at a revenue loss.’
‘There would be a lot of work needed for that to happen. Crypto works differently to card transactions — when you check out with a retailer using a credit card, you authorise the retailer to pull money off the card, whereas with cryptocurrency is more like a bank wire where you’re pushing the money to the address. It’s a completely different philosophy. For example, crypto wouldn’t work for subscriptions that authorise a card to be debited monthly. Also, for a transaction to be authorised, you must wait for two blocks to pass; typically, this happens every 10 minutes for a popular currency like Bitcoin. So, it’s not feasible now; imagine waiting 20 minutes for a transaction to go through when you buy a coffee.’
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