This is episode 37 of the Leaders in Payments podcast and Stephen Pair, the Co-Founder and CEO of BitPay is our special guest this week.  

Stephen is a Georgia native and went to Georgia Tech where he got his Computer Science degree and currently he lives just outside of Atlanta.  

BitPay was founded in 2011 with the idea of enabling companies to accept BitCoin payments similar to accepting credit cards. BitPay built an API similar to a common payments gateway for merchants to tap into so they could accept BitCoin – which at the time was the only cryptocurrency.  

Their customers are traditionally in the IT services or cloud hosting space, electronics retailers or in the video gaming space. They also process transactions in the B2B space.   

If you look at all of the cryptocurrencies and blockchains today there are hundreds of billions of dollars or wealth stored in these blockchains and by adding cryptocurrency into your payments platform you can tap into that wealth. When a company adds cryptocurrency as an alternative payment method, they see that 40-50% of those customers who pay with BitPay are actually net new customers.   

Stephen tells an interesting story about how they got the domain name bitpay.com Stephen has a passion for solving difficult problems using technology. From a personal perspective he loves flying. He is a pilot and has his own plane and uses flying as an escape from the daily grind of running a business.  

If you want to learn more about BitCoin, cryptocurrency and blockchain as it relates to the payments industry this is the episode you need to listen to.