The adoption of crypto payments, particularly using stablecoin, is revolutionizing how businesses make cross-border payments to employees, contractors and suppliers, according to RocketFuel Blockchain Inc (OTCQB:RKFL) senior sales manager Daniel Gonzalves.
Apart from cutting out multiple layers of intermediaries, using crypto makes the payment process cheaper and more transparent.
In an interview with Proactive, Steve Darling asked Gonzalves how customers operating in multiple jurisdictions have benefitted.
Proactive: I'd like to focus our conversation on what you're hearing from people, especially businesses, on how it's made it easier for them to do business.
Daniel Gonzalves: One thing that we found, and this is actually recent, we have businesses that have multiple locations. For example, we have one in Mexico right now, and they have another location in the United States. And it seems like it would be the easiest thing to send some funds from one entity to the other. They're the same business. But for whatever reason, every time they send the money, it gets stuck. And you know, what do you do about that if you're relying on invoices being paid, and you have to pay employees, etc? So by leveraging the blockchain and stablecoins, we can move that money across borders seamlessly and extremely fast.
And that seems to be a big one, especially for that unbanked community because a lot of people will be working in the gig economy where they get a job, they get paid for it, and then move to the next job. Not having that infrastructure that you need, where you would normally get a paycheck, this seems to be a much smarter solution for people to use.
I agree with you 100%, especially with what we're noticing with our payouts product, and then using cryptocurrency to make a cross-border payment, if you have someone like a Fiverr (multinational online marketplace for freelance service) or something like that, where they have a bunch of contractors in different countries, and they're unbanked, and maybe they're a writer, a photographer, an artist, a voiceover artist, whatever the case may be, and maybe they make you know, 50 bucks, 100 bucks, and they need to pay the rent. How do we get the money? How does anybody get the money? Cryptocurrency solves that problem. And it’s a big problem that we're facing with the traditional banking system, especially when we're trying to send money across borders, and especially to those that are unbanked.
Let's talk about cost because research shows there is a lower cost of using cryptocurrency. As we know, there are a lot of banking fees that kick in whenever you do anything bank-wise. Is that another appeal for this?
It's a huge benefit. Depending on the currency that you're starting with, there's usually an exchange rate to go from one currency to another currency, maybe there's intermediary exchange rates that you have to deal with, along with the actual cost of processing the payment, and then even just a wire fee, right? Just the 35 bucks, the 50 bucks just to even initiate the wire. So how can we reduce all of that? By using crypto. It’s a single FX rate. And if we're using a stablecoin that's pegged one-to-one to the dollar, it's usually very close to the dollar. And that's what your fee is.
Daniel, how do you get people, especially businesses, to understand how crypto works and why it can be a big benefit to them? Is there still a big learning curve that needs to happen? Or is that more sort of a myth here in North America?
I think here in North America, the adoption rate for crypto is lower compared to the rest of the globe. Explaining crypto to someone who doesn't know a lot about crypto can be challenging. But it's very easy to understand from a high level. The most important thing to know that it's extremely secure. Using the blockchain, there's a bunch of people in the middle that verify the transaction for you, instead of one big bank. Think of hundreds of small banks verifying the transaction. And it means it's safe.
Where RocketFuel is concerned, you're looking at a lot of this to tap new revenue. You've got products that are on the market right now but I would imagine that there's always the ability to create new ones in order to increase revenue.
Yes, that's the beauty about being small and nimble, instead of being the 1,000-pound elephant in the room. It allows us to build solutions based on customer needs. It’s not a cookie-cutter solution. We do have a cookie-cutter solution, don't get me wrong, but for the most part, where it gets exciting for me, especially, is to say what problems are you having and how can we help you fix them.
This interview was edited for style and clarity