Published on June 11th, 2022 📆 | 4017 Views ⚑
0Cryptocurrency fuels new business opportunities
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Joseph Lupo agrees. Lupo is a general manager with CoinBits, which helps businesses and investors securely build, manage, and protect their money in a private bitcoin portfolio. âWe saw a demand for higher net-worth individuals and businesses who want to invest in this new asset class,â says Lupo. âThey need an on-ramp and someone they can trust since bitcoin doesnât have a team or headquarters, so we started Coinbits Reserve to help businesses and higher net worth individuals invest in bitcoin. We manage their investments but also focus on education and what this new form of digital, finite money can do for them.â
Crypto considerations
While companies ponder potential business models and use cases for cryptocurrency, there are factors to consider before entering the market. Cryptocurrency is still marked by volatility and wild price fluctuations. And security and regulation compliance concerns can slow adoption in more heavily regulated sectors, such as finance. âBanks are going back and forth on how they can get into crypto compliantly,â says Xi of Prime Trust. âWhatâs holding them back is that the regulations in this space require both crypto domain knowledge and compliance expertise to understand. Making it worse is that there havenât been clear regulations on whatâs compliant.â
Also pressing is the need for IT infrastructure to evolve to integrate cryptocurrencies. For example, The Pavilions Hotel relies on a legacy booking engine for guests to reserve a hotel room online. However, Toon says the system was unable to accept cryptocurrency payments. The company searched for an alternative, but in the end, Toon says, the hotel chain wasnât âable to find a suitable vendor that was willing to allow us to put cryptocurrency through the booking engine.â
As a result, rather than book online, The Pavilionsâ crypto-paying guests must make a direct booking through the companyâs reservations center. Following a call, an agent delivers an email containing a link that guests click on or scan to complete a cryptocurrency payment. Itâs an extra step that Toon says can âslow down the process. People want to book nowâthey donât want to talk to anyone or email anyone. They just want to make the reservation themselves.â
As cryptocurrencies gain mainstream acceptance, Xi says businesses will increasingly seek out agnostic IT infrastructure that allows for easy integration with a wide array of features and solutions. Otherwise, she notes, âit can become overwhelming and cost prohibitive to deal with multiple vendor integrations.â
Another challenge facing organizations entering the cryptocurrency market is a scarcity of qualified talentâ a key component in developing innovative products and services. âWe all know that engineering and product talent in crypto is extremely hard to come by these days,â says Xi. Which, she says, can lead to one of two unfavorable outcomes: either âhuge costs upfront to staff in-house teams,â or alternatively, if a company chooses to scrape by on a modest-sized team, âa really long time to go to market and a missed opportunityâ to gain a competitive edge.Â
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Reviewâs editorial staff.
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