general manager, works with a diverse set of clients and partners — big banks like J.P.
In October, Coinbase said it picked Marqeta to power its new Visa debit card.
It’s part of a broader trend to link cryptocurrencies with practical financial tools.
For Syed, who worked at Mastercard for nearly five years before joining Marqeta in 2016, the deals underline a big change in the finance world.
The predominant view of everybody who was in the crypto space is crypto will replace all currencies.
It’s more important to be interoperable than to say, “I’m here to take over everything else.” That’s what we’ve seen occur in crypto more recently, all the folks that are coming to the table.
There won’t be such a thing as money, and that is just how everybody’s gonna transact.” This idea of an alternative digital currency that rules everything is not a new idea.
That’s a great question.
That’s how you have to think about it: incremental investments, and they just kind of continued and all of a sudden when you look up you’re like, “Oh my God, we’re this high up now and we’re ready.” That’s how it’s kind of gone.
I don’t think it’s unforeseeable that we could end up in a scenario where those crypto exchanges or people in the crypto space want to provide more and more banking-like services.
The banking industry was like, “Oh wait, you want me to sponsor a program that’s in the crypto space?” So it’s helping them get comfortable with it and saying like, “Listen, this is how this is done.
I’m much more comfortable.” I think that was us really pushing at the forefront saying, “You got to get comfortable with this.” We’ve seen them evolve to that place.
The biggest thing about this is, how well do people understand the types of securities that they’re now buying and what this could potentially mean for them in terms of how much money they have.
Can this thing only take a left or right turn? You saw large enterprises start investing in blockchain.
I think they have an immense opportunity over there.
You put all this together, we’re making it so much easier for all these different types of products to get created.
A lot of us were founded around 2010, post-financial crisis, when a lot of this started really happening.