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Fiat on-ramps, banking partners crucial for institutional Web3 adoption

Fiat on-ramps, banking partners crucial for institutional Web3 adoption

Fiat payment rails and neobanking services are becoming a vital cog in driving mainstream adoption and acceptance of the wider cryptocurrency space, according to key industry figures at the intersection of traditional finance and Web3.

Executives from OpenPayd, Ramp Network and Damex unpacked the increasing importance of third-party payment rails and banking platforms in conversation with Cointelegraph during the recent European Blockchain Convention hosted in Barcelona.

OpenPayd CEO Iana Dimitrova outlined how their firm processes over €3 billion of monthly transaction volume and has issued over 2 million accounts, including several prominent cryptocurrency exchanges, including the likes of Crypto.com.

Cointelegraph journalist Gareth Jenkinson alongside Szymon Sypniewicz, Samuel Rondot and Iana Dimitrova at the European Blockchain Convention in Barcelona.

As Dimitrova explained, OpenPayd’s core offering is banking and payments infrastructure for various industries including the cryptocurrency space.

“The reality is that there is a growing level of mistrust on behalf of both regulators as well as traditional holders of access to payment rails, whether that’s SEPA or SWIFT, banks or systems that manage the payment rails insofar as the crypto world is concerned,” Dimitrova said.

The CEO added that fiat on-ramps and payment rails could bridge the gap by addressing concerns around identity and traceability, “ergo money laundering,” which she says remains a perception held by traditional financial institutions and regulators.

Samuel Rondot, the managing director of Damex, unpacked how the Gibraltar-based firm specializes in providing fiat on and off-ramps for “higher risk category clients,” including iGaming, Forex, family offices and hedge funds. The company typically converts large amounts of cryptocurrency to fiat and vice versa in euro, pounds sterling and U.S. dollars.

Damex’s clients deal with reputational issues with their bank accounts on an almost daily basis because they want to interact with the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Pondering why banks remain “allergic to crypto,” Rondot suggests that the problem comes from a misunderstanding “of the tool and the principle.”

Related: Crypto payment solution Ramp expands on-ramp service, adds support for 40 fiat currencies

This has led to the creation of services like OpenPayd and Ramp, which are beginning to fill the role of specialist actors that understand and facilitate AML and KYC…

Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Cointelegraph.com News…