Today our speaker is Dmytro Baimuratov – business analyst at Paytomat projects and the topic is Future of Crypto Payments 2020.

Dmytro, how are you today?

Hi thanks. Thanks for inviting me and I hope this will be a really cool episode of cryptocurrency and one of the reasons why I decided to call it Cryptocurrency in 2020 is because right now cryptocurrency is in this stage where it has to be developed. You know, a lot of projects are just creating something but they just get in stuck with this: ICOs, the price of Bitcoin and stuff like this. But right now they have to just focus on building the project that they really want to be successful in the next few years and 2020 for me is the year where I believe 2020-2021 where the cryptocurrency payments will be not maybe massively accepted in stores and in e-commerce, but they will be very close to that thing. In the next two years I believe there will be a very big currency crisis in different governments and right now we can see that in Iran, in Turkey, previously in Venezuela and all over the Africa and right now people are really succeeding the projects. The teams that are working in those countries they’re really succeeding in the chase of getting merchants, starting accepting crypto and right now in Venezuela there are over 4,000 merchants who currently accept Dash and Bitcoin and this is a very big number, because in total there are about 15,000 merchants in the globe who currently accept any cryptocurrency and so this is a very important step in getting cryptocurrency mass adoption and I believe this pattern will continue to show up in different countries and maybe in the next few years we will see the same thing in Europe and other places and Asia and Africa. The more distrust from the customers, from the people will be toward the government, the better cryptocurrency will perform in this specific area or country, or region and that’s basically one of my main points why I decided to choose this year. I hope this little preview was good enough and we’ll wrap it up with some questions.

What’s about the Crypto Hryvnia?

Crypto Hryvnia is really cool project and I believe it can be successful if it is implemented in the right way. Right now in Paytomat we have our wallet and in the future, if everything will be okay, we will be able to use Crypto Hryvnia as one of the tokens or coins or whatever this to convert it from cryptocurrency into Crypto Hryvnia or vice versa. This can be a stable coin for our government but if the Hryvnia itself will be absolute then in this case Crypto Hryvnia I’m not sure it should be.

We have 2 Crypto Hryvnia projects. What is the most interesting for you?

Probably the one that Mike Chobanyan is currently making. We actually accepted Crypto Hryvnia when we started that last year and we already showed it to the mass audience at the Kuna Stakeholder Conference and we showed the preview how it works and it works pretty fast and it was kind of cool.

New merchants, they are willing to accept crypto but they are very new to the crypto area, how to start for them? For example, they are selling some digital products on their website. How to start? They can download your app, you have app for merchants?

It depends on what type of business they have, if it is e-commerce, they can download one of our plugins. Right now we have plugin for WordPress and also we have a web panel where they can sign up and create invoices on the fly for any customer, however we also have API so that they can use for the custom development for their website so that it is natively embedded in their website and in this case they can accept crypto pretty fast.

You are now an EOS-based project. Why did you decide to choose EOS and how is it going? What do you think about the future of EOS in general?

There are multiple reasons why we switch to EOS. The primary reasons probably are because it’s fast, it’s instant and it doesn’t has any guess or something like this, like in Ethereum and there are a lots of interesting permission settings and management that is very important when we’re going to switch that to our merchants. It’s really interesting how EOS have been so far, right now it’s kind of like still in the earlier stage, right now there are only a few projects that are developed in EOS and we’ve been recently in Korea conference where most of the major block producers have been together. It was kind of weird, because we were like one of these three projects that were showing up in those stages. Basically, right now it’s kind of like the Ethereum early stages of development but they’re already a lot of projects that are built up on EOS and people will go and switch toward that blockchain, because it’s not only fast and efficient but also there will be a lot of identity systems that right now are happening and developing in EOS. One of the projects that’s really cool is Scatter, although they are right now have desktop application there will be, I believe, a very big advancement in the next whatever years and this pattern of digital identity will be very tied up with EOS usernames and I hope that EOS will be smart enough to make this thing together with digital identity foundation by Microsoft, because it’s basically a group of companies that are creating a complete ecosystem where people who have no identity like in Africa or South America or South Asia, they can create one, they can confirm it with biometrics or whatever, they can tied it up with property rights, with certificates, with whatever and this whole thing will be, this digital identity can be one of the main thing that will allow people to transact across borders for everything. Basically, you can buy real estate from person A and sell it to person B it will be recorded on the blockchain and everybody will see who is the owner currently of this particular property and in this case EOS or some other blockchain that’s already working on this stuff will be really helpful to accomplish this.

What are you thinking about becoming the EOS block producer? Because you have a big community it seems it would be not so hard to get votes. Were you considering this option?

I’m not sure I’m the one who can answer this question. I don’t know, because to be a block producer you have to be quiet involved in Chinese community, because most of the block producers they are Chinese based and there are a lot of debates about this, because it’s kind of like centralized, but there are a lot of interesting things happening there and I’m not sure if right now is the time to become block producers, because there are a lot of people who are turning off their mining facility basically and that is not a good sign.

What’s about Stable Coins, what do you think?

Stable Coins is really interesting concept, so I believe they have a really particular use case, so if a person believes in crypto but not 100% but like 20%, they can just switch from their Dollar, Euro, Yen, whatever into Stable Coins and they can switch between Stable Coin and Bitcoin or cryptocurrency of their choice and they can do that instantly and if this will be implemented in different wallets and if those Stable Coins will be fast enough so that you can pay with them, it will be really cool use case.

But I think decentralized is not about Stable Coins.

I know, but if we can get enough people switch from the paper money, from Dollars, Euros, whatever to Stable Coins, then it will be very easy for them to switch from Stable Coins to Bitcoin, because it’s right now most of the Stable Coins they are traded on most of the exchanges. So it will be really fast and this is the main point, because the big issue is to switch from Fiat to crypto and if you can do that even into Stable Coin, this is really important.

What’s about regulation all over the world?

Regulation is very major issue and it has to be solved and can be solved only by governments, but also a lot of projects that are blockchain-based and fintech-based they can impact the government decisions as well. If there will be a very big community of people or projects, they can come up with something really big together with the government’s and so they can impact the decisions that the government make and the regulation will be a lot easier to solve, but you need to see at what’s happening in the world. Japan is one of the major indicators on regulations and so we have to see on what’s happening in Japan. Japan’s like the number one country in terms of economic growth and if they are making this decision to make Bitcoin fully legal that is a very good sign. In a lot of other countries like Switzerland you can pay utility bills and taxes in Bitcoin, it’s really cool. A lot of countries like Korea will be fully accepting crypto pretty soon, I actually thought that would happen a year ago, but not yet. Still Korea is one of the top places where there is a majority of cryptocurrency holders, they own a lot of crypto but they have no way to spend it and this is interesting.

What is the legal side of Paytomat services?

It depends on the country. In Ukraine we have a full framework for how we can do that in our country because we are from Ukraine, for other countries it depends on what right now is allowed in this country and we have to work with the lawyers of that country and to figure out what can we do, what framework can we use to be able to do this kind of business activities. In most of the European countries there can be implemented similar framework like in Ukraine and this is really a positive sign. In U.S. for instance, in any country in general, there will be a gateway which basically a company, a financial institution or mostly exchange who has the license to swap basically crypto into Fiat. If they have this capacity, if they have this license, they can be our gateway, I’m not sure, I don’t remember the particular roadmap when we have this feature, but when it’s going to be implemented, gateways will also get a portion from each transactions that are happening in a network and there will be even a competition for gateways in different countries, so one country may have different gateways and this is really common in India. Basically when you withdraw in money or doing something like this in India you can choose between 15 different gateways and the same stuff can be here and people will compete in which, so the lower the fee that gateway would take from the merchants the better chances that it will be picked up. That is how it works.

About Paytomat adoption. Which countries are faster for this? Because in Ukraine we know there are many places which accept, maybe around 50 restaurants, maybe more which already accept cryptocurrencies, but what about other countries? I know there are some places in the European Union some even in the United States of America and what are your primary markets?

It’s kind of like the most difficult question even for us, because we’re trying to choose markets based on the market conditions right now. In U.S. we recently signed a deal with Restaurant Association and Night Life Association which basically covers every single bar, nightclub and all of the restaurants in U.S. in general, so they have like hundreds of thousands of merchants across U.S. and we already have a few merchants in Los Angeles and New York that are already accept crypto and this market can be really big, because the most interesting thing was about U.S. is that there are a lot of customers, cryptocurrency holders who have crypto and in case with U.S. if they want to convert the crypto into Dollars, they can do that on Coinbase, they have to pay about 20% tax and if they don’t pay this tax they can just spend their crypto wherever it is accepted and it was really interesting to see when we launched this place in Los Angeles, there were a lot of people who were paying with crypto. But this is one of the markets, one specific market. The second type of markets is where cryptocurrency has small consumption, so basically there is a very big number of cryptocurrency holders as well: it’s Korea, it’s China. In China it’s not forbidding already, but still it’s not the best market for, because there is WeChat and stuff like this, so it’s not appropriate to go there, but there are a lot of interesting countries like Venezuela and Africa. There are a lot of cryptocurrency holders and it’s the third type of markets is when the economy is not stable and as already said the more unstable the currency of a particular country is, the more cryptocurrency usage we’ll see there. Basically, it will start from those countries and then it will expand to more stable economies.

Actually, from your words it’s interesting tip, for example, some people who are watching us, if they have some digital stores and focusing on the U.S. market, that’s real competitive advantage to start accepting crypto, because there would be people who hold crypto, there will be people who are spending it. If they have an option to spend Fiat or crypto, today it’s a real competitive advantage. I think it’s really good option for new people to come to crypto is to start accepting it. Regarding Venezuela, do you plan to visit it, what are the plans of a Paytomat regarding Latin America?

We already have merchants who accepts crypto in Venezuela, it’s really cool. We have a very active community right now starting in Venezuela, they are really amazing. I’m not sure about visiting Venezuela, maybe sometimes in the next few years, but what we’ve done that will allow us to target different markets without going to those markets is we have this regional leaders program: anybody who wants to accept crypto, not accepting crypto, but who wants to do what we are doing here, but in their country, to sign merchants to accept crypto, to develop the community, they can do that and we will pay them for doing this.

Basically you have open positions of community managers all across the world.

Not particularly community managers, there is Paytomat global and there will be like Paytomat Venezuela, Paytomat Spain or Paytomat U.S. or specific U.S. state or whatever and this how we view this staff.

What about your Paytomat application? How to start using it?

We have two types of application: the one is for customer – it’s Paytomat wallet, the other is for merchant, but for merchant we have several use cases like interfaces in which you can choose whatever you prefer, we have web panel where most of this stuff can happen, we have merchant app for Android iOS, we have some static QR code which is mQR which is really cool, I will talk about it later and other applications. For customer we have a wallet, you can download our wallet, back up your seat freeze, make sure you do that and then you can just use your crypto.

Is it easy to use?

It is pretty easy, in the future there will be a lot of different loyalty programs inside of our wallet and our strategy is what we’re seeing right now with other EOS based wallets and is what’s actually happening in blockchain space that we have to switch from just wallet into the marketplace. The main kind of goal is to make user only use our wallet and stay in this wallet forever, there will be not only payments like you can send crypto to any person but you can play games there, you can trade inside of this wallet and do stuff like this. It’s basically like a WeChat in the crypto and that’s what we seen in EOS different wallets and that’s what we’re moving towards as well and recently we’ve added a lot of different features like the Ethereum tokens, the EOS tokens. We are basically the only wallet who supports both, I’m not sure, there are separate wallets that support EOS tokens and a separately support EOS based tokens but we are the only one who support both. Also we have different features that you can recently re-implemented: a simple wallet protocol which is kind of like a way for any user to sign in inside the centralized exchange which is based on EOS, because most of them are Chinese and most of them are decentralized and this is really interesting way how those exchanges are working. You don’t need to have an account, you need to have an EOS account but you don’t have to have an exchange account, you can just log in inside of this account and there will be the same balance that is showing on your wallet inside of this exchange account and you can just trade from your wallet basically. Every single time when you put an order, you need to verify it by scanning a QR codes and basically you sign the transactions in this case, so it’s really cool, because there will be tens of different decentralized exchanges and you may have only one EOS wallet and you can log in inside all of those exchanges and trade between those exchanges without any additional details. One wallet and you can do magic.

As I understand correctly, is the private key stored on the device?

Yes, we don’t store any private keys, it’s not the study of wallet, so it’s all in you. If you lose your seed phrase basically we have no access to it, only you can restore it.

Also interesting about EOS, because we as media decided to focus on EOS-based projects. We had a question and some feedback that new people to crypto they have some problems with creating EOS accounts with not yet user-friendly applications and as I understand in Paytomat you can just choose a name – 12 symbols, pay with any crypto which you have in the option BTC, DASH, ETH, ZEN – you support maybe around 10 cryptos right now and you’re adding more cryptocurrencies and they have already this wallet, so after doing this they can start interacting with EOS holders and even receive airdrops tokens so it seems it’s more user friendly. Do you see this competitive advantage?

Of course. EOS is very heavily focused on China and most of the projects are coming from China and if you go to most of the EOS-based wallets which are only on EOS and no Bitcoin and stuff like this and you want to create account there, you click on create account there will be some page opening up on Chinese and you have to figure out what are my steps to create an account, like it’s impossible to do this stuff and there is no translating to English button and when I was creating my first EOS account I was doing it through Scatter, back then it was supported by plugin in Chrome and it was kind of not that hard process but for an average user it’s very complex and so by having this one little small feature but it can be really big actually. It’s probably may be not the main advantage, but one of the good ones.

What do you think about ICO, is there any sense near future?

That’s a good question. I’m not sure, I don’t know actually. What happened to the ICO so far there were a lot of people who were rising like a ton of money, like millions of dollars who have no white paper and no website and basically nothing, no projects, nothing at all, zero. They raised millions of dollars and they were no legislation, they have no company stuff like this, so they hold crypto, crypto fall and it’s a lot of money that they have lost in terms of dollar equivalents and they still have no working project and like this. There are lot of researches and studies that are showing that most of the ICO’s like 90% or so are scams, because they have no project whatsoever. If we compare ICO to something we can compare this to dot-com bubble, because there were like lots of projects that were raising ton of money and they basically are gone. The same stuff will happen with the CoinMarketCap page to go from two thousand coins or tokens into 50 or something like this in the next few years. ICO will go from and I have no idea actually, so it’s my personal opinion, I believe this utility token concept is already gone so there is no use case for utility based tokens, I have no idea what is the use case for utility based tokens, there will be a very interesting are security based tokens, ICOs are not gone in this way of raising money, it’s not like that, but still it’s utility based ICOs are finished.

Actually, it is interesting to us, because you had the ICO, the token sale and you raised very fast the soft cap and while the last stage a public token sale you decided to cancel it and choose another model, so basically right now everybody who is interested in Paytomat PTI tokens can buy them on EOS based exchanges. Why did you decided to change this model though you may be afraid that you would not collect a hard cap or maybe you decided just to focus more on EOS community, why did you choose to change the model?

There are tens of answers for these questions basically but the main ones are that:

A. People have to really look at the Bitcoin price, right? It’s felt like really it’s crushing, still crushing and it will be in this stage for maybe a few months, maybe a year, maybe like a couple of months, we have no idea, right? Most of the cryptocurrency funds they have a loss of ninety percent, so they are already lost money and they’re not willing to invest in anything right, so this model of raising money from like an ICO as already told, is finished, it’s not possible to raise money when the market is not hyped or whatever. If there is nobody who is willing to invest money and if Bitcoin is not going to rise in the next few months, so it’s kind of like logical that we need to adjust over the market, so we’re basically most of the time we’re adjusting towards what is happening right now, not what is what has happened so what is going to happen, but is right now. What we seen is that there is a really active community in China, in Korea and other places and those people who are already invested money, they will be able to withdraw tokens in summer – January and they will be able to trade them on those different exchanges, but right now people can go and buy those tokens from exchanges and this model makes a lot more sense because basically right now people don’t need to raise money in order to launch a token. You can create a smart contract, create on token, but you need to back it up with some really cool project. If there is no project it doesn’t make sense to have a token. There are a lot of EOS-based projects and all of them they have some token but there is no value in this token whatsoever, but we have a very strategic use cases of this token how it’s going to be used and this model.

Do you have a website and social networks accounts? Where can people ask more questions?

Of course we have a website. We have website, basically all over social media like Facebook, Twitter, even Instagram, like Bitcointalk, Medium. We have main Telegram group which is Paytomat, there is Paytomat announcement group, but it’s mostly news and stuff like this and there are also dedicated groups in different regions: we have Russian community, we have Spanish community and maybe I’m wrong but there are some other languages that we are supporting. We have white paper, pitch deck and stuff like this. On our website’s you can check it out.

The simplest way to get your question answered immediately, just join a Telegram group, it will be answered in a couple of minutes, a bit faster.

Thank you Dmytro a lot for the interesting conversation, we invite other people from the EOS community all around the world, maybe from China you mentioned, they have big community. Kyiv is a great city, so we invite you for our next crypto breakfast!