Ryan McMillin from Merkle Tree Capital speaks with Gabriel Carey from Cadre Capital to challenge the myth that you can’t buy or do anything with crypto.
Transcript
Gabriel Carey:
I want to ask you about the actual use case for what crypto and digital currencies. Many people say that there’s nothing you can actually do with it. We remember a pizza being bought in the first instance, but what’s really happened since then? Can you actually buy anything with cryptocurrency?
Ryan McMillin:
Yeah. So it’s less of a myth bust maybe, and more of an education piece where we can buy just about anything with crypto right now. It will typically be through a fairly specialized counterparty and far from ubiquitous, but this is changing rapidly. Around 75% of retailers in the US are planning to accept some form of crypto payment over the next two years. And some nations are even making Bitcoin legal tender. The US is considering legislation that would see payments under $250 become tax free, such that crypto could more easily be used as a currency.
Bitcoin as a payment network is, in many ways, far superior to a Visa or MasterCard, which charge merchants around 3% in fees. Bitcoin Lightning Network can make payments for a fraction of this, and support instant settlements. In an increasingly digital world, we need a truly digital payment network. The existing networks and existing payment networks were built in the 1940s, and haven’t changed substantively since. Technological transformation does take time, but we’re now approaching an inflection point for crypto payments, Block, PayPal, Stripe, are all rolling out solutions in this space.