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Lowest possible cost at the fastest possible speed: those twin objectives have been at the heart of payments modernisation for the past decade. There are obstacles to both in the cross-border context, but, by and large – be it splitting a bill with friends over WhatsApp, making an account-to-account payment for goods and services or a one-click purchase on Amazon – the aspiration has been reflected in consumer experience.
All these innovations and more have, of course, been built on top of a unit of exchange that’s remained stubbornly unchanged for hundreds of years: fiat currency. It’s odd, then, that the pretender to that throne – cryptocurrency – fails so spectacularly when judged on the same www.fintechf.com
Charlie Meraud, Co-founder and CEO of Paris-based altfi market-maker Woorton, wants to see digital assets go mainstream… but he’s not convinced he’ll be paying for café au lait with Bitcoin any time soon
metrics. Not only are transaction costs often prohibitively expensive, especially for small purchases, but it’s also incredibly slow at processing. Bitcoin’s maximum processing capacity is seven transactions per second. Visa’s average is 1,700. It’s partly why Charlie Meraud, co-founder and CEO of Paris-based
Woorton – a market-maker in the digital asset industry, dealing with 300 counterparties across the world, including institutional investors, asset managers, exchanges, brokers, OTC desks, payment providers, blockchain foundations and crypto startups – believes ‘no one is ever going to pay for a cup of coffee with Bitcoin’. “That might have been the idea when it was created, but I think we can be sure it’s never going to be a currency in that sense,” he says. That will no doubt disappoint Starbucks, which recently announced that its customers could use Bakkt, a digital asset platform, to convert Bitcoin to USD to load onto their Starbucks accounts. But it will please investors in companies that have grown spectacularly on the back of crypto trading. Issue 9 | ThePaytechMagazine
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