We meet the entrepreneur who’s using blockchain technology to crack the tricky micropayments market
If I had a fiver for every company who tried to convince me they’d cracked the problem of micropayments over the years… well, I wouldn’t be writing a story about another one.
SatoshiPay’s Meinhard Benn says his company has created the “pocket change” of the internet. And if you’ve nodded knowingly at the first part of the company’s name, you’ll know by now that he’s using cryptocurrency to do it.
The Satoshi is the smallest unit of Bitcoin, the crypto equivalent of a cent or a penny, and named after Bitcoin’s shadowy founder Satoshi Nakamoto. However, SatoshiPay has recently dropped Bitcoin in favour of a different cryptocurrency. We find out why and discover how the company believes it will prosper in a micropayments market where so many others have failed.
Catching the bubble
Benn became interested in Bitcoin early on. “I started mining Bitcoin in 2011, so very early,” he told us. “I thought this is very interesting, let’s keep an eye on this space. And in 2013 it took off in terms of Bitcoin hitting $1,000. I thought I would use this momentum to start a company.”
By the end of 2014 he’d launched SatoshiPay as a generic Bitcoin payments processor, similar to what companies such as BitPay are doing now. “We quickly realised there’s no differentiation and Bitcoin as a payment method is not taking off – we need a bit of a niche here,” he said. “We picked the niche of nanopayments or micropayments. For the first use case of those small payments we picked publishing, or micropayments for content, because that’s something very tangible.”
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