Ben Weiss on CoinFlip and the growth of Bitcoin ATMs across America

0:01i'm ashton addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and fintech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have ben weiss the ceo of coinflip ben thanks so much for taking the time and welcome to the show hey ashton thanks so much for having me glad to be here you're very welcome i'm excited for this discussion and i'd love to kick it off

0:21with just starting with a little bit of your background on how you got into blockchain first and how that led to you joining the coin flip project so i went to school at vanderbilt and when i was in school in college um late 2014 early 2015 i started getting into bitcoin i was fascinated by the whole thing i had a friend one of my really good friends from high school

0:48growing up in chicago suburbs who just bought he was a big bitcoin guy too but he bought a couple atms just two or three and um he called me and we were talking about bitcoin and then you know we eventually just teamed up to get all these atms on the ground and get coin flip running so you know we've been in this space almost six years now and there's so much fascinating things

1:15going on and you know you really do learn something new every day in this space just when you thought you knew everything i'm sure you know how that goes yeah well it's a fast-paced industry and especially if you've been around for six years you've probably seen drastic changes uh and it's accelerating it seems to be quicker than ever so hopefully that is in coinflip's favor

1:36if you could just dive into a little bit on you know what is coin flip what makes coin flip unique how has the team differentiated itself from other bitcoin atm operators throughout the states so like i said coin flip started in 2015 and the reason um we started coinflip was we saw this big problem where it was actually puffed bitcoin and in many ways it still can be to buy

2:02bitcoin and the thing is 20 to 25 of americans are unbanked or underbanked which you know a lot of people may not know so many americans rely on cash in the cash economy um to participate you know in normal life and i think bitcoin one thing that i was really attracted to is it really can be a democratizing force and i think you know

2:29if you don't own bitcoin in a way you will be left behind but there was this issue of how hard it is to get bitcoin especially if you don't have a bank account or if you're unbanked or if you just want to buy fifty dollars a hundred dollars so we saw the need for the atms and we saw all these unbanked and underbanked um you know communities who were kind of

2:48being left out of this financial revolution that was supposed to be a democratizing force so that's why we went the atm route instead of the exchange route and i'm proud of the whole industry in general i don't know if you look on coin atm radar but i think there's been more atms put down in the past six months or a year than in like the past four years

3:12combined before that so the industry's blowing up i think there's a lot of great guys in the industry some of the things that i think sets coinflip apart is our 24 7 customer support we charge the lowest fees as well and back to that customer support and you know we have over a thousand atms in the us um 43 plus states and a lot of these people who are going to the atms are you

3:38know beginning investors they want to get into bitcoin but you know they need more support more customer service than someone who's just going on someone who's been doing this you know for five or six years so that 24 7 customer support we're really proud of we don't use any call centers we don't outsource any of that you know all our support reps are in-house employees

4:01and you know we take that um very seriously we're very proud of that that's a great backstory ben and it's a truly a true entrepreneur journey when you personally have a problem and you go and create the solution and now five years later you have a giant operation with a thousand plus atm so that's truly a great entrepreneurial story and it's interesting that you

4:23mentioned um over 25 of americans are either under under banked or unbanked and you hear that stat a lot in developing countries and you know how most of the world is unbanked but you don't really think to look inside of the united states and the fact that actually is and was hard to get bitcoin throughout the states and i know that the regulatory laws are

4:47changing hopefully in favor and that you and the coin flip team have been working on that in in california and through federal regulations as well to make it more available can you talk about uh that battle that you've been fighting and uh the progress that you've made in terms of what's happening in california so in california specifically i mean we

5:09work at the federal level too for instance uh congressman roe khanna um i think he's very well educated uh blockchain and bitcoin and i know um he's very interested in fintech and i think he's gonna do great things for the industry in the future but in terms of california at the state level i mean california is so important what happens in california

5:34usually starts happening at the rest of the country so we've been working in california for over two years with both the regulators and the legislative body the general assembly majority leader ian calderon has been very plugged into the bitcoin space we've worked on a bunch of bills there you know versions change there's the budget coming up but basically

5:56um what it's coming down to now is that the department of business oversight who's the regulatory body there is actually going to double in size and it's going to be called it's going to become a consumer protection and financial innovation agency and part of that process is they're going to require unregulated financial products not just crypto but including crypto companies

6:22like ours um register with the state and have some basic safeguarding requirements and we think this is very important because it keeps bad actors out which legitimizes the industry you know if someone's buying bitcoin for the first time imagine if they get ripped off by you know an atm machine or something else you know we have a interest in making sure that everyone's

6:45playing by the rules protecting consumers we want this to be um a good experience for people and i think a lot of uh bitcoin people sometimes fear the government but as long as you know the legislators and regulators are getting educated on the issue i think a lot of them want to do the right thing you know they're pro innovation they want jobs in their space they don't want to lose

7:07the crypto market to china or asia or other areas so you know california um we've been working with them for two years there's change in the beginning of 2021 there's going to be some regulatory changes such as the registration consumer protection um and basically hold the part of business overseas getting revamped but you know regulation can help the

7:30industry but you want it to be pro innovation that's the problem you know regulation that isn't pro-innovation is bad regulation that protects consumers but as pro-innovation like what they're doing in california i think you know is really great yeah i think it's a great step in the right direction um as you mentioned at the beginning of the interview the people that you know

7:53aren't holding bitcoin or don't learn about it could easily be left behind and that's not just people that are working every day that's the regulators and you know the people that are driving the fintech industry because this is a global industry if there's any regulatory blocks people can just go internationally and with a global currency really it's easy to

8:13move locations uh when it's everything's online so that's really interesting because in the past when companies went you know offshore it was because they wanted to save taxes and stuff like that whereas now some companies are being forced offshore not because they don't want to you know cheat on taxes or anything like that they're getting forced offshore

8:34just because there's no clear regulatory work in the us i mean you've probably seen it um firsthand what a lack of regulatory clarity um and that uncertainty that uncertainty can be very bad for business and for entrepreneurs yeah well hopefully all of this regulatory movement you know moves forward at a quick pace i did see the recent news as well in

8:56wyoming about crypto banks and more regulatory uh you know environments for what used to just be cryptocurrency exchanges now turning into sort of full banks so do you see this californian laws that are being put in in 2021 as you know a trickle effect to move into the other larger states throughout america pretty quickly i think so and i think a lot of states i mean

9:20california a lot of people follow the lead of california but at the other side of things regardless of what california does no state wants to be left behind from this you know crypto boom like the next apple the next amazon you know those sorts of companies are going to be blockchain and crypto companies right maybe not in the next year but in the next three or four years 100

9:43i think you know you will see crypto companies be on par with you know the big companies that you're used to hearing like apple facebook google yeah super interesting and you know 2020 has just been a super interesting year overall uh with the volatility in the markets bitcoin going down but then also going up and being one of the best performing assets

10:04you know how has coin flip fared throughout 2020 um and has it been positive uh with all of this you know word about bitcoin coming back up has that really helped you or did it also hurt because of the pandemic so i think the pandemic overall um has a lot of people anxious a lot of people are being squeezed a lot of people are being hurt financially

10:24um especially a lot of my friends in the restaurant business you know have been hurt very hard but overall we've been very lucky and that i think people are looking at bitcoin as a safe haven asset right you know it's it bottomed out i believe in march or april but it's up what three x since then it's been by far the best performing asset and you know i think bitcoin like

10:48everyone used to think oh it's uncertain it's volatile like it's considered risky investment before but now with uncertainty with kovid and other things in a way at least to me personally bitcoin feels like a safer and more stable investment than a lot of traditional investments that i would have thought were safe for two or three years ago like i think the whole market dynamic

11:10has just changed and bitcoin is the safe haven asset it's a stable asset it's what you invest in not just in good times but in times where there's uncertainty yeah well let's hope that uh equals continued growth for coin flip and you know besides top of my head was like i know wealth inequality has always been a big issue but think about how much wealth

11:35inequality there will be if you know certain people are shut out of the bitcoin market you know that's why i think the atms are very important because if bitcoin goes up a lot in price like you know mean you know it's going to we're obviously believers um you want to make sure everyone at least has the chance to buy it and be part of that right yeah it's a currency for the

11:57people so uh yeah so with coinflip moving forward uh i'm guessing that it's going to continue to expand and grow and besides working with the regulatory bodies what are the company's plans for you know the next throughout 2021 and beyond so obviously we want to put down more atms we want to get bitcoin to as many people as possible there's still about six or seven states

12:24we need to bring into so we are working on uh you know we want everyone to be within a 10-minute drive of a coin flip atm we're going to continue working with regulators both at the state and the federal level we don't want the u.s to lose to other countries and last but not least education whether that's education of consumers education of regulators education of

12:48other stakeholders we're really focusing on that you know we're part of the blockchain advocacy coalition california which you know educates people all the way from consumers to regulators to trade groups i think it's very important i mean once once someone learns about bitcoin i've never met anyone who doesn't believe in it or like it you know to the fact that

13:09people don't like bitcoin don't know about you know don't haven't been educated on it i think this it's such a common sense um solution to you know whether it's the inefficiency of the current financial system whether it's the fact that the current financial system you certain people out whether it's just you know the fact that everything is so global and mobile and

13:30think about how easy it is you know me to sending bitcoin without you know having to mail a check or go into a bank or hey it's saturday the bank's closed you know i think that like in this in the long term just obvious that bitcoin is going to i mean it has succeeded but that it's here to stay it's going to succeed and as you've been following the industry like this is only the beginning

13:53like you talked about the you know the banking developments in wyoming like there's still so many you know d5 banking crypto lending there's so many cool fields like a lot of work is going on behind the scenes but we haven't seen maturing yet fully and that's what i'm really looking at too i think these next three four years are gonna be so exciting yeah

14:15well it's looking good and i'm hoping that translates to for you guys to growth in coinflip as well and we're running out of time ben but if the viewers are looking to learn more about coinflip about the atms or to get educated as you said what's the best way for them to learn more okay so you know coinflip.tech um you can look for all of our atms hopefully one is within a 10-minute

14:41drive of your house and if it's not you know hit us up on twitter and let us know so we can put one down we'll do a discount code for the show if anyone's listening um the discount code will be uh coin flip 30 it'll be 30 off um my twitter is uh ben coinflip so you know follow us there check out our website

15:07and we'd love to hear from everyone and we're you know thankful for having us on yeah thank you ben and i will leave those links to all of that in the description box below for the viewers thanks so much for your time all the best with coin flip moving forward and let's follow up in the near future thanks so much ashton appreciate it