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Greatest Hits
Reminder: The Stablecoin Greatest Hits report goes out next Tuesday (31st of May). We aim to provide a well rounded perspective along with insights on the current stablecoin market.
In this conversation, we chat with Sami Start, the Co-founder and CEO of Transak. Transak is one of the fastest and securest way to buy 100+ cryptocurrencies on 75+ blockchains. Users can pay via Apple Pay, UPI, Bank Transfer or use a credit or debit card. The company is trusted by more than 2 million users globally and empowers wallets, gaming, DeFi. NFTs, Exchanges and DAOs in more than 145 countries. Sami is based in London and has worked in high frequency trading and B2C fintech – his passion for fiat onboarding arose from his time at Smarkets. He has degrees in Physics from Imperial College and Computer Science from UCL
More specifically, we geek out on problem solving philosophies and processes, market makers, building the best Web3 applications involving money, the inception of Transak and how it aims to power all web3 companies to facilitate payments using its developer-friendly infrastructure and easy UX/UI, the future of DeFi and CeFi and their convergence with TradFi, and so so much more!
Sami Start: … when the end user buys the crypto, they would see they're buying it from Transak, they would not see that they're buying it from Decentraland. So, we're the onboarding tool. Let's say, for example, Dapper Labs wanted to sell NFTs out of their own inventory and they wanted to handle the liquidity and they wanted to handle the compliance of selling those NFTs directly, and we wouldn't then be the acquirer for them and process the payment. We would see that as something in the realm of a checkout or an agent or a wealth pay. So just wanted to make that quick distinction.
Lex Sokolin: That's a key distinction and I think it also goes to the earlier conversation we had about problem formulation and probably driving the highest leverage for the company too. That's not what you do. In the world of what you do, talk to us about, what does it mean to be merchant? What are you connected to and so on?
Sami Start: Yeah, so we use acquirers who will take the payment for us and send it to our bank account. We use solutions to do bank transfers, we use solutions for credit and debit cards, Apple pay, Google pay. And then we also handle the compliance ourselves. So that means getting the licenses in the relevant countries, such as an FCA license, Orca authorization in the UK, and then we also handle the risk operations ourselves. So that means that we take responsibility for fraud and chargebacks and KYC. We use vendors for all of those things. So, we're not trying to be like an ID verification solution or anything like that. But we coordinate a whole bunch of different vendors and we've built in house risk engine that can …
Finance is being pulled apart by the forces of frontier technology. From AI, to blockchain, crypto and DeFi, to mixed reality, chatbots, neobanks, and roboadvisors — the industry will never be the same. Here is the blueprint for navigating the shift.
Finance is being pulled apart by the forces of frontier technology. From AI, to blockchain, crypto and DeFi, to mixed reality, chatbots, neobanks, and roboadvisors — the industry will never be the same. Here is the blueprint for navigating the shift.
