SatoshiPay CEO and Founder Meinhard Benn (a recent Blue Star Capital PLC – LON:BLU investment) caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss his background, how he became involved in the world of blockchain, what SatoshiPay does, company milestones including their €1 million fundraise, blockchain technology, the difference between bitcoin and blockchain and why SatoshiPay chose to use the technology
Q1: Now Meinhard, can you tell us a little about your background?
A1: Yes, I think for a founder, I have a rather unusual background. I started programming when I was 12, I discovered bitcoin and blockchain technology in 2011 and that’s really when I started to get really involved in it and I started SatoshiPay in 2014. Before that, I did a lot of consulting work, mostly as a software developer but also as a designer and general entrepreneurship.
Q2: So, how did you get involved in the world of blockchain?
A2: So, as I mentioned, in 2011 I first came across it on my research for alternative currencies and alternative monitary systems and then I saw bitcoin and it was just very sound in itself, technically, and also ecosystems started picking up. I knew I wanted to work in that space and so 2 years later I started SatoshiPay, before that I worked with other bitcoin-related start-ups and so the whole bitcoin theme turned to cryptocurrency and then was later called blockchain technology and so out of technical interest initially.
Q3: You mentioned the name of the company is called SatoshiPay but what does it actually do?
A3: So, SatoshiPay is a payment processing platform for tiny tiny payments, we called them nanopayments, because they are like a thousand times smaller than micropayments. So, we can transact individual pennies or even below a penny and fractions of very small amounts and the first use case for that is web content and we see a big market there for sending individual digital goods, as we call them, for an individual image or just a video or a minute of video, an audio file or a news article.
Q4: So, let’s talk about the company milestones, what were your past milestones, how did you get to where you are and what’s coming next?
A4: Yes, so, as I mentioned we were founded in 2014 and we sort of pivoted away from e-commerce bitcoin payments to payment to digital group and very small payments in 2015. We had a couple of funding rounds as well, we had an angel round in the beginning in 2014 and then we had a first seed round and just recently we had another seed round, or a pre-series A round, of €1 million, the largest amount so far. With this, we will start our first growth push so we have a technical validation that we achieved over the last year, we built our product, a minimum viable product and we had very good feedback from testers, from initial users and clients of our software. This gives us good hope and a very good starting point to talk to bigger publishers which we need to build up a lot of traction and transaction volume on our payment network.
Q5: Blockchain is quite a technical thing, can you describe blockchain in two sentences?
A5: It’s tough to do that but basically what it comes down to is it’s a decentralised data storage, like a big database, it’s not running on one or two computers but thousands of computers. These computers don’t have to know each other and they don’t have to trust each other and that’s the big breakthrough, it’s a trust-less system as it’s called, allowing data to be stored and timestamped very efficiently and basically without error and without someone going back and making changes in the past to a database, that’s virtually impossible.
Q6: That explains why companies are investing into this but what’s the difference between bitcoin and blockchain?
A6: Actually, they’re kind of the same thing, more or less but bitcoin was the very first blockchain and bitcoin inspired many many other blockchains so you really have to talk about plural because we have more than 700 blockchains and cryptocurrencies which are running on blockchain. Blockchain is the underlying technology that makes this decentralised trust model possible and a token is needed to incentivise the individual parties to keep this network net neutral and one of these tokens is bitcoin, another token would be Ether or there’s Litecoin so they’re very different tokens and they are usually called cryptocurrencies.
Q7: So, why does SatoshiPay use blockchain technology?
A7: It was a very simple choice, it was the right tool for the job so we wanted to build a financial software, or a financial service, and blockchain technology comes basically as a tool-set for developers and we can just plug things together that are there already and that are built in a very safe manner. Basically, built and tested by IT professionals and it has been challenged a lot, I mean the technology by hackers and so on, and it has never really broken at its core and it makes it ideal to get a very fast service running or let’s say to get to a target very fast and efficiently without spending too much on, let’s say, programming infrastructure that you would need to build a financial service.
If investors have any technical questions, please contact Meinhard directly at @meinharrd or for any general SatoshiPay queries, please contact Satoshi at @SatoshiPay
