Nathan Cropper knows all about the dark side of crypto. He spent eight years at Barclays, tracking down dubious account holders as part of the company’s Financial Intelligence Unit. He was in “a small team that conducted the first analysis of Barclays-wide crypto exposure”. So don’t try telling him that Bitcoin is untraceable.
His job was a little unsatisfactory because he never found out what happened to the individuals whose accounts he flagged up: the cases were just handed over to the authorities and were then out of his hands.
But this education in the murky side of crypto opened his eyes to its potential for legitimate business. On this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, Nathan talks about the intellectual and career path that has taken him from Barclays to his new position as Head of Business Development at the Vaionex Corporation.
His education got a boost when he caught a talk by Dr Craig Wright on YouTube. He remembers that what he learnt in that two-minute clip “answered so many questions in my head that …weren't able to be answered by the rest of this community in the world of crypto. I was like, wow, this guy just said something fundamental. I'm going to actually spend a lot more time looking at what he's talking about and also this thing that people are calling BSV”.
He was on his way to his next role, at TAAL, the mining and transaction processing company. That was two years ago. And now he’s moving again, to a Business Development role where he can make use of his knowledge and enthusiasm to make Bitcoin SV an integral part of the financial world that he used to be part of: “I have got so many ideas about how we can integrate and how we can connect in with the banking system,” he says.
Nathan stresses the importance of facing up to the regulatory hurdles that BSV must negotiate if it’s to realise its potential. That means passing a whole lot of tests to be accepted as financial market infrastructure: “MasterCard have done it. Visa has done it. The faster payment system have done it. There's a whole load of financial technology out there which have demonstrated that they can be considered financial market infrastructure.”
He explains the thinking behind the financial authorities’ careful scrutiny before they award the coveted infrastructure status: “if there's something wrong taking place on the Visa network, it would be absolutely terrible if everybody's card stopped working. That would be dreadful. They can't allow that to happen. So we need to be able to demonstrate that we have the same level of controls in the BSV network so that we can actually encourage big players to want to onboard the network and have people transact on top of it.”
But achieving that status won’t be easy, he warns: “there's a lot of hard work. And it's not simply going to be an easy road. It'll be a challenging one. It's one which I think collectively as an ecosystem would be extremely valuable for us to do.”
So business development at Vaionex is going to be busy - not only in attracting new customers to its multi-product offering, but also in working with other players such as the Bitcoin Association, in taking BSV’s financial utility to the next level.