Blue Star Capital PLC (LON:BLU) Chief Executive Officer Tony Fabrizi and SatoshiPay Chief Executive Officer Meinhard Benn caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the technical improvements to SatoshiPay’s systems, larger customers coming on board, the cryptocurrency market and Blue Star Capital’s share price
Q1: Meinhard, the announcement this morning talks a lot about technical improvements to the SatoshiPay systems, what do you see as being the most important and why?
A1: So, they are very technical, but the business impact is quite large. We’re finally starting to give away about, let’s say, €10 million to users and publishers can receive these lumens indirectly through their users so there’s a huge motivator for publishers to sign up as a business place.
Also, technically, we’re implementing quite some advanced blockchain features here and this also impresses the blockchain especially Stellar has seen quite a lot.
Q2: Now that the free lumens have been distributed, can we expect to see some larger customers coming on board do you think?
A2: Yes, absolutely. So, we already have some sign ups and we’re just waiting for some content to go back with these guys before can announce, we have some joint PR with them as well so the impact there would be quite big. Also, some were waiting for the lumens programme to be implemented and are now close to be signed and we’re in varied progress situations in a few countries at the moment.
Q3: The cryptocurrency market, at the moment, we’ve just see a torrid three months, is this impacting your business in any way?
A3: It is not directly so our technology continues to function very well and so, we’re quite happy with the Stellar blockchain that we chose, or the Stellar Ledger. What it does impact is the sentiment, the market sentiment of it, but in a technical way it doesn’t impact us, our giveaway still worth many millions so that’s quite big and we’re quite happy with that still.
In some way it helps us to focus on the main technical improvements that we had to do and built a sustainable business apart from the whole cryptocurrency hype.
Q4: Tony, the share price, it’s seen a disappointing few months, should shareholders be concerned at all?
A4: No, I don’t think they should be. Obviously, it’s disappointing to see the share price go up as it did at the end of last year significantly and then retrace back down to the sort of levels it was early last year. I think that the fact is the cryptocurrency market had a phenomenal run at the end of last year and that did impact on a lot of businesses that had blockchain-related investments so we did go up a lot on the back of that news and obviously, as you know, some of those cryptocurrencies are down 70%-75% since the beginning of the year so, that has had an impact on us.
I think today’s announcement shows that SatoshiPay is making excellent progress technically as Meinhard indicated and hopefully it won’t be too long before we see some announcements on the customer side. Generally, we’re very happy with the investment so no, I don’t think they should be concerned in terms of the investment, obviously we’d like to see the share price higher but unfortunately, we can’t control that.
Q5: So, what would Blue Star Capital like to see next from SatoshiPay?
A5: Obviously, it would be very nice to see larger customers coming on board and obviously this initial wave of the free lumens is the beginning of that process so that would obviously be what a lot of shareholders in the market would like to. So, we’ll keep our fingers crossed that we’ll see that soon.
