WAYS TO PAY: CRYPTOCURRENCY
Cornering the market Danny Scott, Co-founder and CEO of UK-focussed exchange CoinCorner, on the reality behind the headlines, the power of community and those darn goats
THE PAYTECH MAGAZINE: Danny, you and a couple of the CoinCorner founders were mining Bitcoin back in 2013… what drove you to launch an exchange? DANNY SCOTT: Mining Bitcoin wasn’t really working for us as a business model, but we knew Bitcoin was a groundbreaking technology and wanted to stay in the industry and help drive it. If you think back to 2012/2013, to the Mt. Gox days, it was difficult to buy Bitcoin and we had the skillsets to launch a kind of exchange, but one that was an easy on-ramp for people to buy, store, send and receive Bitcoin using a mobile app. We were one of the first to introduce credit card deposits, and we’ve added various products since, like cashback and Lightning Network integration, so we’re almost a one-stop for Bitcoin services. TPM: The community and, in particular, the social media around cryptocurrencies www.fintechf.com
is just incredible. Dogecoin is literally built on memes. Take all the technology off the table and the cultural impact has been immense, hasn’t it? DS: Yeah, the Dogecoin thing has been absolutely nuts, obviously heavily driven by Elon Musk. People within the industry kind of know Dogecoin was created as a joke coin. Development-wise, it’s sat there as this idle coin, over the years, that no one’s really bothered too much with. The impact of social media, and how things can go viral these days, is effectively what has happened with that; TikTok and the rest have driven it. Scary to see, but interesting, nonetheless.
One of the things we have tried to do, from day zero, is educate people on what Bitcoin is. That gets very hard during these periods when there’s so much noise The community is so powerful in this industry. We saw that, back in 2017, with the user-activated soft forks [blocking unilateral upgrade decisions by developers and the bigger mining pools]. Even the big global guys were not able to budge the community. That showed the
real power behind Bitcoin, which comes across these days in the memes and social media impact. It’s getting more powerful with the likes of Musk and Michael Saylor getting involved, tweeting about it daily, and it’s incredible to watch. As Molly Spiers, our head of marketing, says, Bitcoin drives this industry… companies do not drive Bitcoin. It does its own thing. TPM: So, has this changed your customer base and how you handle them? DS: It changes our responsiveness because things happen so quickly. Mark Zuckerberg posting that he’s naming his goats Max and Bitcoin, for instance. Obviously, then, people are speculating ‘does that mean he is a Bitcoiner?’. Goat, in a sporting context, means ‘greatest of all time’, too, and people jumped all over that. Obviously, that attracts mainstream attention and brings new people through the door, which is great, but one of the things we have tried to so, from day zero, is educate people on what Bitcoin is, and how it can be used to benefit them and change the world. That gets very hard in periods when there is so much noise, so much going on and we’re having to put something out to help decipher headlines around Mark Zuckerberg and his goats. It’s tiring is the best way to put it. Issue 9 | ThePaytechMagazine
43