The Paytech Magazine 09

Exactly a week after Amazon tycoon and Bitcoin investor Jeff Bezos shot Star Trek’s original Captain James T Kirk into space, the cryptocurrency market rocketed to another all-time high. Everyone, it seems, as Jack Dorsey’s single emoji tweet that day implied – is ‘going to the moon’.

Actor William Shatner’s whistle-stop sub-orbital trip was a strange collision of fiction and reality: the same could be said of cryptocurrency… an asset with no tangible underlying value frequently propelled to stratospheric heights by powerful amounts of hot air. But are the altcoins that Amazon is reportedly preparing to accept, now crossing their own final frontier?

Charlie Meraud of altfi market maker Woorton (page 49) is sceptical that we’ll be buying flat whites with crypto any time soon. Danny Scott of one-stop crypto exchange CoinCorner (page 43), on the other hand, is pretty certain that the Lightning Network – which is just at the start of what could be a massive upheaval in the online streaming payments space – and other altfi-driven solutions to retail payments will, eventually, take us where no currency has gone before.

Crypto, stable coins and central bank digital currencies topped much of the agenda at this month’s very-much-real Money20/20 Europe (page 6) – and rightly so. The paytech industry has a mission, a duty even, to explore these strange new worlds.

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In this edition, we feature… drum roll…

• Anders la Cour, Banking Circle Group
• Rhea Chatterjee, Monument
• Danny Scott, CoinCorner
• Eli Rosner, Finastra
• Gabrielle Bugat, G&D
• Jason Ang, SmartStream
• Myles Dawson, Adyen
• …and many more!