In recent years the online publishing business has faced serious disruptions. With a business model heavily reliant on targeted ads, which pay per click or per eyeball, the spread of ad blockers wrought havoc on many websites and required the industry to think up new and innovative ways to make money without scaring away users. Bloockchain entrepreneurs saw this as an opportunity to for cryptocurrencies to create a new market and startups such as SatoshiPay, the Brave browser and the Steem social network were born. Join the industry leaders at the Finance Magnates London Summit, 14-15 November, 2016. Register here! Finance Magnates talked with Meinhard Benn, the founder of SatoshiPay, about his company’s approach to the matter and how it compares with the competition. How did you get to your position in the cryptocurrency scene? I discovered Bitcoin in 2011 through a news article following it’s $27 price spike. I became immediately excited because I had researched alternative currencies for many years and started mining it on my work computer’s GPU straight away. Two years later, after bitcoin’s second big price spike I got more involved with the underlying blockchain technology and started working with early startups in the space. In 2014 I started SatoshiPay, aiming to make bitcoin payment integration as easy as possible. Why did you decide to refocus SatoshiPay on online nanopayments? Our initial product was a white-label bitcoin payment processing service for traditional payment companies. The initial surge in merchant adoption of bitcoin as a payment method quickly plateaued, so we looked for different applications of our technology. With the help of Coinsilium, our new investor at the time, we identified nanopayments as an exciting field to focus on. Can the bitcoin blockchain handle millions of paid pageviews a day across the world? No, Bitcoin […]
