Sean Mackay: “Crypto payments are very well suited for online gaming”

CoinPayments’ CEO tells Focus Gaming News why crypto is the payment solution for online gaming.

Exclusive interview.- Cryptocurrencies are revolutionising payments, and many gaming operators are seeing the potential. Sean Mackay, CEO at CoinPayments, took time out to tell Focus Gaming News why the company’s putting a major part of its focus on the sectors.

CoinPayments is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, so it’s been around since before many people had even heard of crypto. It was born out of a natural extension of its majority owner’s crypto mining equipment business since miners wanted to be able to pay in the coins they were mining, and it was one of the first crypto payments gateways to support altcoins rather than just Bitcoin.

Today, it supports over 150 coins for payment and over 2,000 coins and tokens for its wallet. And while MacKay notes that tech companies and web hosting were among the first to see the possibilities of crypto payments, the online gaming space was not far behind.

“The way crypto is structured is very geared to the gaming space,” he says, noting that it’s a simple solution that helps avoid bank processing times for card payments. It’s borderless, payments are final and settled in seconds.

“There are no chargebacks. It’s in your pocket and it can’t be pulled away,” MacKay says. Gambling is seen as high risk for card payments, meaning that transactions typically pay 5 to 10 per cent plus in commissions. Fees on crypto payments can be as low as 1 per cent, and CoinPayments is even lowering its initial fee to 0 per cent.

Gaming operators generally want the same thing, MacKay notes: they want deposits to be made quickly and they want to avoid the risk of the volatility inherent in some cryptocurrencies. In most cases that means immediately converting payments to the online platform’s local currency.

There’s been a change in the currencies most used to make crypto payments, however. Until 2019, Bitcoin remained the dominant payment method accounting for about 80 per cent of its CoinPayment’s payment volume. That’s changed dramatically in favour of stablecoins.

“Stablecoins have become the method for crypto payments,” MacKay says – most specifically Tether USDC on the Tron network as a TRC 20 token. This has become a preferred option for customers who are also keen to avoid the volatility of the first generation of crypto.

CoinPayments put its head down during the crypto winter and got to work on a major release for its platform that it believes will off more scalability, security and faster transactions – “Pretty much a brand new platform,” MacKay says. It’s also been focusing on compliance issues to enter new markets and has become a regular attendee at shows in the gambling sector.

See the full interview with Sean Mackay on the Focus Gaming New YouTube channel. Don’t forget to subscribe.