Alexander Alexandrov on building CoinPayments into a global crypto processor

0:00I'm Ashton Addison from event chain for investment pitch media and fintech News Network and today on blockchain interviews we have Alexander alexandrov the CEO of coin payments Alex welcome to the show and it's a pleasure to see you again man yeah thanks thanks for having me likewise you're very welcome uh let's kick this off by uh learning a little

0:21bit about coin payments for those who don't know yet could you give us a quick overview of the company when it started and what are the solutions that you guys are currently providing right so coin payment got started in 2013 um it started off as a like a forum Community Driven system to allow people to pay more than just Bitcoin at a time and it's grown into a platform now that

0:44supports over 1100 digital currencies um allowing different assets class in digital world to be able to use as payments for um anything from buying socks online to you know paying for video games and that kinds of stuff uh including the uh also Rick and morot SCE that now allow it through posos Integrations into their devices that's awesome yeah I've

1:06actually you know taken a look event chain has integrated coin payments uh I know you guys are integrated with overstock.com um I've seen a variety of plugins for like Shopify WordPress all this kind of stuff uh maybe you could explain to the vendors that are interested you know how easy is it really to to go from learning about coin payments to now accepting cryptocurrency

1:27for your products and services well um it's quite our system is designed to be very easy to use so I think uh from the learning curve it's pretty simple if you ever set up a WordPress website or running a WordPress website uh you know you've already over qualified you know to do this job so this is uh you know it's designed to be as easy as integrating PayPal into

1:49things so we kind of think of ourselves like U almost like a crypto PayPal uh we use all the plugins are pre-made for anyone to just drop in into their website and start seven payments uh sign up process is super easy if you ever signed up for any email service uh which most people in the world who are online have some sort of email address it wouldn't be any more sophisticated than

2:11that uh the only level of sophistication required is basically finding out which coins you actually want to accept because generally our vendors don't accept whole 1100 it's a little intense yeah um but you get to pick what you like and then you get to pick what you get to convert into what you like as a result and then that's where people kind of get lost and configure and it depends

2:31on you know how much time you want to spend configuring all those little details but if you just leave it as default you will accept I believe 50 coins by default automatically and it will convert into one coin that you like or keep it as this so again the setup is super easy uh and is as complex as you want it to be it depends on how you are with the settings that's great and um

2:51just to clarify a little bit further you know it's it's very easy to accept the coins but then those vendors have to either if they're either going to cash out or they're going to store the coins and I I believe that you guys have a full you know wallet system that stores all of these coins do you guys have like cold storage for the coins on coin payments website or how do the vendors

3:12keep their coins safe yeah so our system automatically keeps Cold Storage uh allocation that I believe at at this point is 80% to 20% um fluxes all time depending on the use case and and how much daily withdrawals we see uh to facilitate you know actual normal usage and then rest is kept offline for security reasons uh on top of that we introduced a volt function so if a

3:36merchant wants to keep it in tether or any kind of stable coin because I I believe we have the largest stable coin support of any payment processor right now in crypto uh we also allow people um accept payments directly in stable coins so right now the Market's a little unstable so that we're finding a lot of vendors are switching to that right now but I'm kind of segueing into that a

3:57little bit um essentially with uh with Bitcoin uh or any coins that you keep in our system you can volt it and when you volt it that automatically puts them into coold storage before you so essentially then if you on onv it takes about 24 hours for our Tech to literally bring it back online for you um until then they're locked away and what we're doing now we've been working for um well

4:18better half of this year uh writing the new multi signature system that will uh come into effect we hoping really soon we're just doing an audit right now with a couple independent firms to confirm that as we roll out Tech it is um it is safe to use and it's uh been uh audited by a third party not just you know ourselves who are you know obviously a

4:37little bit biased when we write our own code so that will ensure that users will have uh keys on their own we have two keys one with us and one with a Recovery Service Company that's been independent from coin payments so that way uh you need two out of three in order to do any transactions and then you can do three out of five and so on so forth but uh

4:55the base level will be two out of three so that's the new upgrade that we're working towards that's great that's awesome and I know a lot of people that are just getting into cryptocurrency they're curious that you know the security of the coins and they've heard things so it's great it's comforting to hear that you guys have a security system in place now you

5:13mentioned that you guys started in 2013 and I know you guys have done a lot of business growth in the last few years especially in the last probably since 2015 and on you know how big is uh the the company now how many vendors are you guys using like is this being used all around the world um yeah so we're right now in 196 countries I don't know how many more

5:34there are left um so I mean I'm pretty sure we like now I think it's more expanding and building that user base uh but we definitely wherever there's internet we're there essentially um that said uh vendors wise you know it's a rule of 19 uh 910 right so basically 10% of your vendors do most of your volume that very much implies with us as well so even though we have about two and a

6:00half million users in total you know when it comes out to Merchants let's say you know uh 200,000 active Merchants that are really doing all the volume and all the activity the rest are just kind of logging in once in a while to check their wallet and do some minor interactions and things like that so that would be kind of uh still applicable in our industry as well

6:17sounds great good for you guys so if there are investors VCS fund managers or other people that are looking to get involved with coin payments and your guys' initiatives are you guys conducting any more financing or growing to the next stage where are you guys at uh we're constantly growing uh that's actually it's great and it's painful at the same time because we constantly have

6:39to scale up hire new people and expand even in the low market right now we're actually expanding our team um because we've been Smart in tethering things in the right times which kind of helped us a lot during these moments um that said uh next year is going to be huge for us or this year actually never mind we're in 2019 now just kind of realized it's

7:00already a new year so this year we're actually uh very very excited about I believe crypto is going to make a huge comeback this year uh we're getting closer to Litecoin halfing in August and then Bitcoin halfing next May uh not this year but the following year so I think no matter what it's going to be a return of interest and um usually these events trigger uh Revival of the market

7:24so hopefully this time is no different and uh that will kind of I mean what we've noticed every time the Bitcoin starts to rise or ethereum starts to rise or any of those M major coins starts to rise the US users influx you know grow tremendously volumes expand tremendously right so those are the moments we really sit here and prepare for it because while it's the slow times

7:45it's kind of the times that we used to build out the tech prepare for scalability and everything else and when we get hammered we get hammered and everything just fails right so we have to make sure we have to make sure that we're prepared for the next round of such event and uh you know you remember last November uh the year before actually not the previous one but anyway

8:04that that time was pretty crazy the fees went up through the roof nobody was ready for that you know it was just it was just so many service providers were just not able to handle the volume right uh we survived through it thankfully uh it was good learning experience and now learning from that we're preparing for the next one ahead of it that's great

8:24and yeah it's I believe that you know the real players are working the hardest during the bare markets and that's how they get ahead so good for you guys uh So speaking of hard questions and bare markets you know maybe you could touch on some blockages or you know roadblocks that you guys have in limitations in on the way to achieving your goals you know

8:47are you guys succumbing to any limitations right now I'm not sure I understand question for completely sure do you guys have any you know limitations or roadblocks or is everything smooth sailing you know in 2019 or do you guys anticipate some hard challenges to overcome right well in this industry everything's a challenge times uh you starting from regulations

9:10down to you know coins getting 51% ATT tax or random Forks that people don't notify you about on a smaller chains um so it's a never ending battle I wouldn't recommend anyone to get in this industry unless they're prepared to stay up 24 hours a day and lose their sleep but it is it is rewarding if you love it uh so for us we don't look at as challenges

9:31just part of what we do it's something that we love every single person in our company has grown up with crypto since about 2011 onwards so it's sort of in our blood now so this Insanity which will shock anybody coming into this industry now for us it seems quite normal um the only thing that I do see is a is is a slight challenge is trying to understand how uh how they're going

9:53to imply the sanctions lists to cryptocurrency operators uh so everybody's kind of right now looking at that and trying to figure out like what the heck are they going to do and how we have to respond to that and what is the right move here so we're dealing with a lot of uh on the legal side you know we've had to scale up on how much we spend on legal advice so that would be

10:12the only challenge but it's you know it's like any other challenge we will um learn and adapt and kind of deal with what's thrown at us that's great yeah and I guess it's just the natural course of businesses it's always going to take three times longer than you think and cost three times more exactly yeah so 2019 we're here at the beginning what are your guys's plans uh for the road

10:34map and your milestones in the next six months or throughout this year so like I said we planning to roll out the multi- system uh we're hoping to get it done by the end of q1 of this year uh that's obviously contingent on all the AUD audits being how we want them to be right the results uh being positive and everything else and if anything's found will'll take us a

10:58little longer to adjust re audit and come back out so my goal right now is q1 for that uh we're also uh implementing a lot more tight Integrations with conversion uh for coins so right now we're using shape shift and Chang Le we're seeing a lot more other players emerging in the space we're also directly working now with some of the exchanges to try to um uh work directly

11:20to lower the cost and create more robust system for our users as more and more Merchants are requiring it so there's going to be more service expansion uh we're also rolling out a new multisig app as well which will allow people to hold their private keys for the gold stores that they can contain themselves versus uh trusting our B system uh which is I think is the right direction in the

11:43crypto industry and um and also we're getting closer to um getting more and more financial licensing and uh kind of uh coming out more mainstream payment processor uh over the next year uh I'm not going to reveal too much but we're working in a lot of jurisdictions right now to accomplish a few great things in that direction awesome great I'm looking

12:04forward to that and uh that's very exciting to hear that you guys are doing mobile apps as well so um that's all the time we have right now um thank you for your time Alex if there are vendors which I know there are many that are looking to start accepting cryptocurrency what is the best way for them to learn more about coin payments to talk to the team and get

12:22involved so so the best thing is to go on our website uh just open an account it takes 30 seconds really to get going and then depending on what you need you'll you'll kind of dive into configuration if you want to learn more about we have a detailed tutorial online on how to integrate your store into quain payments step by step we have YouTube videos that can be easily

12:41searched and found um all the resources generally available on our website as well and like I said it's super easy so you shouldn't have too many problems and if you do you can always message our support team that's over there 247 they'll answer any questions you have wonderful awesome thank you for your time Alex I'm looking forward to catching your upate in our next

13:00interview in the coming months and until then good luck thanks a appreciate it