We’ve been seeing a lot of “traditional” companies/institutions getting involved in crypto lately - from Visa to PayPal to Twitter. Now, global payments processor Stripe is forming forming a crypto team because clearly, they see the writing on the wall - especially as a payments-orientated business. And as I wrote about last week, one of the things web2 companies will need to do to stop the great brain drain is to become a crypto/web3 company.

Guillaume Poncin @gponcin

We’re starting a new crypto team at @stripe. I’m hiring engineers and designers to build the future of Web3 payments: stripe.com/jobs/search?q=….

October 12th 2021

1,023 Retweets6,610 Likes

It’s very obvious to me that this trend is only going to continue to accelerate as crypto takes over the world. There’s definitely a very strong awareness from web2 companies of how quickly they could be disrupted (since they were the disrupters of so many industries over the last 20 years). Though to be honest, I actually think a lot of them are late to the party and because of this they’ve allowed many newer businesses (such as crypto exchanges) to eat into their market-share basically uninterrupted over the last few years. Of course, it’s still better late than never for these companies, and I’m betting Stripe’s crypto team will be a force to be reckoned with given Stripe already has a massive customer base that they can offer crypto-related services to.

Now, not every company or institution will be able to easily integrate crypto into their products/services for a host of different reasons. I think it may be especially hard for entrenched financial institutions like banks to make the jump into crypto - sure, they may have some services that they offer to clients (such as custody), but they are competing with very experienced players like Coinbase in this area. In saying that, their large existing customer base may prove a strong enough moat for these institutions to get a foothold in this industry - though I don’t expect them to be offering anything fancy like yield farming products.

The last industry to adopt crypto is probably going to be something that has been slow to adopt existing technologies like modern computing. The healthcare industry immediately comes to mind here as many healthcare systems run a decades-old technology and are notoriously hard to upgrade (many of them still run Windows XP - yes, seriously). You may be wondering what the healthcare industry has to do with crypto and, while I’m no where near an expert on this, I can tell you that it actually does have some pretty nice applications for secure transfer of medical records (using fancy zk technology) - though that technology still needs to mature before it’s ready to be productionized for this sort of stuff.

Eventually every company will be a crypto company whether they want to be or not - this technology will simply force everyone to adapt. The more forward-looking companies will be fast to adapt while the ancient and traditionally slow-to-move ones will lag far behind but still eventually integrate crypto in some way. On top of that, there will be plenty of new companies and DAOs born over the next few decades that will go on to become the modern “mega-corps” - but without the dead weight of legacy institutions!

Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano

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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.