Keep Your Eye on Blockchain

Last week Stripe, the payment platform, agreed to buy Bridge Network for the rather unicorn-sized sum of $1.1 billion. This figure would eye-watering enough – but it is also based on a 200% increase in valuation since August. Now that has to be interesting… 

Initially, I wondered if this heralded crypto’s rise from the ashes or would prove to be another woeful example of a corporate buying up ‘cool’ young tech and things not going quite to plan (eg News Corp’s purchase of MySpace). 

Then the news broke that Sam Altman’s new start-up is moving away from crypto and focussing on eye-scanning technology. As a reminder, Sam Altman was the force behind Chat GPT so has a pretty shrewd take on the way the wind is blowing.  

So what do these two seemingly opposing moves tell us? 

Firstly, ignore the currency element of any crypto-babble and take a hard look at the blockchain bit. It is this that is likely to become a feature of conventional finance systems. If you are screaming ‘what on earth does that mean’, essentially emerging fintech which uses blockchain – including biometric identification such as eye scanning – will sit alongside tradition payment methods. Blockchain will simply be a technology layer servicing the transaction rather than driving a currency. 

As technologies like eye-scanning prove their viability as secure identity verification, decentralized finance (DeFi) applications and cross-border transactions become safe and practical. This means that payment services, such as Stripe, could elevate their proposition with seamless verification.  

If this is the mark of a new direction of travel, don’t let the phrase ‘crypto’ seduce you into that weird time where your local barista is a crypto millionaire but doesn’t have the cash for a bus fare. This is something that has the potential to work well for your business, your customers and sports fans.  

For anyone who has tried to make an overseas payment – or who is on the receiving end – the steps you have to go through currently are, at best, laborious and annoying. Frictionless payment is something all stakeholders appreciate so has huge potential for the sports sector. 

The old cliché goes that in a gold rush, be the ones to sell the picks and shovels. In pivoting to biometric ID, Sam Altman is doing just that. These two pieces of news don’t speak to opposing forces, they appear to be two parts of an intriguing new order.