Ryan X. Charles talks making crypto payments easily available to all

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While the number of cryptocurrency users increases by the day, its use for day-to-day payments has yet to take off. This is largely due to a lack of consumer-facing applications that can simplify the crypto payments process, leading many merchants to stay away from crypto. This is a narrative that Ryan X. Charles, the founder and CEO of online payments startup Money Button, is working hard to change. In an interview with CoinGeek’s Becky Liggero, Charles explained how cryptos are changing the lives of millions in Latin America and why Facebook’s crypto project is setting itself up to fail.

“Fundamentally, what we are trying to do with Money Button is improve the user experience of Bitcoin,” Charles explained. The company is building solutions that enable the average crypto fan to be able to use crypto with a few clicks.

Already, there are quite a number of applications that use Money Button, and they have all had nothing but praise for its efficiency.

“Paymail is just an extension of everything we are doing to make Bitcoin wallets interoperable with each other and with exchanges in a user friendly way. We are just trying to make everything as easy as possible so that normal people can start getting the benefits of Bitcoin,” Charles explained.

Paymail launched three months ago, promising to do for Bitcoin what email addresses did for the Internet. While the current Bitcoin addresses contain very long and random characters, Paymail substitutes them for readable names, akin to email addresses. 

Charles also delved into the continued uptake of Bitcoin SV and other cryptos in the Latin American region, stating that they offer the region a way out after decades of economic upheavals.

“People there use Bitcoin as a way to basically hedge out of their local currencies,” he stated, giving Venezuela as one of the examples. Despite having rich oil reserves, political instability has seen the country register over one million percent inflation in the past year. This has greatly decreased the value of their currency, and Bitcoin has been the best, if not only, viable alternative.

Bitcoin is also introducing transparency, especially in government processes. And while this may be misread as an anti-government chant, Charles believes that Bitcoin is here to assist the government, not topple it.

“We’re going to help governments collect taxes, but then also be held accountable that they spend that money correctly.”

And despite the initial hype that Libra attracted, Charles believes that Facebook missed the big picture and failed to understand what Bitcoin seeks to do. Bitcoin is an economic system where businesses that solve people’s problems like identity and contracts can be built.

He concluded, “It’s great to see that they are open to this kind of technology, but we are significantly ahead of them. But it’s only a matter of time and they’ll come around. We can help them if they reach out.”