SatoshiPay CEO and Founder Meinhard Benn (a recent Blue Star Capital PLC investment) caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss what makes their system so special, how it’s used, how they generate revenues, what’s next for the company & how investors can get into SatoshiPay through Blue Star Capital PLC (LON:BLU)
Q1: Now SatoshiPay, it allows customers to take or make small payments but what makes your system so special, what’s your secret sauce?
A1: Well there’s something of a buzz word ‘blockchain technology’ and we really put it to very good use and in our system it makes things faster, more secure and also cheaper. We allow payments, especially for the end-user, for the consumer, to be done within milliseconds and that’s kind of unheard of in other payment systems and stable, this is because we are using the bitcoin blockchain which has been up for 8 years now. So, there was not a downtime and I don’t think you can say that about any other financial system that’s out there, it’s just always on, you just can’t really stop it. So, we have huge cost savings, using blockchain technology and we pass that on to the publisher because we offer quite low fees.
Q2: It does sound complicated though, is it hard to use?
A2: When people hear blockchain they’re scared but what we did is we spent a lot of time wrapping all this complexity in a very easy-to-use interface which is actually inspired by mobile games, things have to be really simple in mobile games. Normally, micropayments and nanopayments, which we’re dealing with, have quite high transaction costs because to do them is much more expensive for the user, like in their minds, than the actual amounts that are transacted. So, we’ve reduced this to 1-click or even automatic payments in the background so people don’t have to think about it anymore and therefore they don’t need to be bothered so much by these micropayments happening in the background. So, all the user needs really is a PayPal account or a credit card, they don’t need to login or download any software, they can just top up and they are ready to go in the next 20 seconds without any prior knowledge about this technology.
Q3: So, how do you expect to generate revenues with these small payments?
A3: So, small payments is a kind of a higher volume game, of course, but if you think about it that we allow to add a small price tag to every single file transacted on the internet, this can generate billions of transactions within hours. So, there’s tiny transactions but there are many many of them and we build a highly scalable system that can transact these and we take a 10% cut so potentially if our system gets adopted well, which we believe it will, it can generate quite big income.
Q4: So, what do you think is next for SatoshiPay?
A4: So, we have quite a full road map and a lot of ideas. We need to focus on our web use case so we will introduce, very soon, website-to-user payment as well. Currently we’ve built something that allows you to spend small amounts on websites but we will also reverse this and allow websites to pay users very small amounts, for example, for filling out a survey or giving up certain private data or just doing some sort of micro-work just translating one line of text, these kinds of things. The next application of our technology will be in the machine to machine, or Internet of Things space, where also billions of small transactions are expected in the coming years. The third sector we want to get into is white label solutions so people can base their own loyalty system or a small currency, like a game currency, based on our backend.
Q5: What kind of timescales are we looking at there?
A5: So, the website-to-user payments will come within the next 2 quarters, the machine to machine payments probably by the end of the year and the white label solutions most likely next year.
Q6: You’re not listed on the London Stock Exchange at the moment so how would investors get into nanopayments or into SatoshiPay?
A6: We were very lucky to get Jim Mellon as one of our lead investors and also Blue Star Capital PLC actually joined us in our last round and they are now the largest shareholder as an investor and they’re actually listed on AIM so investing in them gives you almost direct access to our company as well.
Blue Star Capital PLC (LON:BLU), the investing company with a focus on technology and its applications within media and gaming, confirmed on 31st January 2017 that it had completed its investment in SatoshiPay.
