David Marcus, former executive at PayPal and Meta/Facebook, commented on his goals for Bitcoin development during a meeting September 11 interview on CNBC.
Marcus started by describing his current company, Lightspark, which builds payment solutions for Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. He said:
“What we’re trying to do is turn Bitcoin into a truly global payment network. We are still in the fax era of global payments and that is what we are trying to solve.”
Marcus emphasized during the interview that most popular payment services do not fully support international transactions or cross-application transactions. In contrast, he suggested that many other online services, such as texting, emailing and videoconferencing, are almost universally accessible to their users.
He also called international transactions a huge business opportunity, with “trillions of dollars of transactions” taking place on existing networks.
When asked whether the adoption of Bitcoin as a real currency could result in a higher market value for the asset, Marcus said:
“Our view is basically that Bitcoin is not the currency that people will use to buy things… the actual net settlement layer that is used is actually Bitcoin Lightning and is settled in real time, in cash and at a very, very low cost. ”
Marcus added that this approach allows for currency exchange – including dollars, Japanese yen and euros – “at the edges of the network.” He didn’t clarify whether this is a core feature of Lightning or a planned feature of his own Lightspark project.
Marcus has a long crypto and payments history
Before founding Lighstpark, Marcus was Vice President of Messaging Products at Facebook, now known as Meta. After taking on that role in 2014, Marcus moved to a blockchain group within Facebook in 2018 to lead the development of the company’s now-defunct Diem stablecoin and Novi wallet. He left the company in 2021.
He also served as vice president and president at PayPal from 2011 to 2014. By the way, Marcus commented on PayPal’s current stablecoin goals in a conversation with Axios at September 8. There he suggested that PayPal is likely in a better position to launch a stablecoin than Meta, in part because of PayPal’s existing payment services.
Marcus briefly served on Coinbase’s board of directors from 2017 to 2018, but left that position to work on blockchain products at Facebook.
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