Back in 2017, Uphold Enterprise Chief Executive Officer Robin O’Connell built an Ethereum miner with his officemates to get first-hand experience with the new technology and understand the difficulties miners face. 

O’Connell used Ethereum’s first wallet, MyEtherWallet (MEW), to collect the Ether earned from helping secure the network. His journey has now come full circle with Uphold’s Topper payment service and wallet that recently integrated with MEW’s community of over three million active monthly users.

“It’s fun that it’s all coming full circle in that now we now have this product with MyEtherWallet,” O’Connell said to me during a recent interview. “The Ethereum miner serves as a reminder of where we came from and is a cool thing to have in my office.”

O’Connell is also working on the business-to-business side, forging partnerships and figuring out how Uphold can support the payment needs of other companies.

“A lot of people know Uphold by its consumer-facing wallet, but what folks need to know is that everything powering that wallet is on a platform,” O’Connell said. “We have a platform that includes all of our [know-your-customer] regulatory compliance, our liquidity anything-to-anything digital asset system, our blockchain connectivity, banking payment connectivity—and the list goes on.”

Given the central role a wallet plays in interacting with blockchain, wallet providers such as Web3Auth and Uphold are becoming an increasingly important vehicle for crypto mass adoption. That’s especially true for businesses attempting to send cross-border payments.

“You can’t do an on-ramp without having a regulated entity like Uphold, without having the KYC stack to know your customer and without being able to instantly give a price on a digital asset,” O’Connell said. “You can’t do it without being connected to the payment systems so the person can buy it, and you need to be connected to the blockchain so you can send it in the self-custodial wallet.”

But that’s only one part of the equation. Like Web3Auth whitelabeling wallet solutions for other businesses, Uphold has also partnered with companies like Mythical Games and Brave to have its technology under the hood—the plumbing that helps the payment processing for digital assets. 

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O’Connell’s first job out of college was in advertising, after which he went back to school for his MBA—and following his graduation from business school—started working for VISA.

“It was a fun time to be working for VISA,” O’Connell said. “I don’t want to age myself, but it was sort of Internet 1.0. It was a job where we were trying to figure out how to facilitate people making payments online. It sounds ridiculous, but at the time it wasn’t.”

He discovered blockchain in 2012, and joined Uphold three years later. His earlier experience at VISA made him well positioned to spearhead a payments charge in crypto.

“Crypto/blockchain has been looking for its killer use case,” O’Connell said. “DeFi has fulfilled that to some degree, but there’s still a lot of speculative stuff going on out there. What excites me is when there’s a digital asset use case that is innovative or just replaces the way things are normally done. What we’re seeing a lot of now—and what I think is going to be one of the killer use cases—are stablecoins to make cross-border payments.”

O’Connell said he’s seeing a surge in businesses utilizing the Uphold stack to make cross-border payments to other businesses–-something he believes benefits the entire crypto industry.

“If payments start to move through blockchain and replace the ‘old way’ it’s done through SWIFT, the banks will get more totally involved,” O’Connell said. “All the big players will get more totally involved and I think it will change the way people think about blockchain and crypto in a really positive way.” ALong those lines, VISA last week announced it was helping Spanish bank BBVA develop its own stablecoin, among other digital assets. 

Read more: Zhen Yu Yong Ditched the Post-Business School Path to Create the Most Popular Web3 Wallet Solution You Probably Never Heard Of

“Having come from more traditional finance and payments, those guys don’t necessarily want to change anything,” O’Connell said. “If I go to my bank today, there’s functionality for me to send money to another person or bank in Mexico. The problem is, what’s happening on the backend.”

According to O’Connell, people are being charged three to five percent and there’s no direct or instant real-time payment to that bank in Mexico. Instead, the money will go through a series of correspondent banks—one or two hops that can take three or four days.

“It’s slow and it’s expensive,” O’Connell said. “But when you have a system that can do it through blockchain—and you’re talking about stablecoins so there’s no volatility risk—then that’s a better system. And if there’s a better system, then it’s going to happen, and that’s really encouraging.”

It’s especially encouraging if “change” is really only the main hurdle faced by these traditional banking institutions.

“I’m not familiar with a bank that I could go to today that could help me with a stablecoin transaction,” O’Connell said. “That’s pretty basic but it’s not going to start with the banks, it’s going to start with corporates or other more fintech solutions that are looking to help with those money movements. Anytime you’re asking any corporation to change anything, that’s a hard ask. But if they’re already integrated with a fintech cross-border payments system, and those companies start to adopt digital asset or stablecoin payments, then we can work with those companies and it’s a more scalable way to do it.”

Which is why mass adoption through web3 wallets might just be the feedback loop that helps sustain the future of adoption. 

If traditional finance and fintech companies need a company like Uphold because they can’t do what Uphold does on their own—facilitate instant payments in a regulated manner, source liquidity for the stablecoin, send it, and have all the right monitors in place so they’re not sending to a bad address—then the more traditional companies will be using web3 technology, which helps build trust around the tech.

“Another interesting thing outside the cross-border stablecoin use case is this notion that—especially with artificial intelligence (AI) and things becoming more automated—crypto becomes the only way to program money,” O’Connell said. “The programmatic pieces built into smart contracts can help replace existing payment flows and they’re doing it in a smarter way.”

He continued, “Imagine sending over a digital asset that’s pre-programed. Yes, you’ve received those funds, but they’re only released when you hit certain levels of satisfaction and milestones. That’s another area I think will happen and will help us get closer to mass adoption.”

Ironically, part of what will aid mass adoption is not focusing on the underlying tech behind smart contracts.

“People don’t need to know the complexities of the stablecoin or blockchain as long as they know that using it is going to be faster and less expensive,” O’Connell said. “To get adoption you need to break it down to the fundamental use case, allowing the blockchain and complexity to disappear. It just needs to be a simple and easy user experience.”

lead image: Robin O’Connell