Canadian bitcoin startup Coinizy recently announced the final launch of its services, as well as launched the world’s first Ethereum debit card.

The exchange offers users bitcoin to fiat exchanging options such as PayPal, Western Union, and a set of virtual and plastic VISA Debit Cards. It now allows its customers to convert their Ethers on the platform as well.

Currently, there are over 600 cryptocurrencies and it remains to be seen which of these succeed to hold their ground in the future. Coinizy CEO Yannick Losbar said in a statement that whatever cryptocurrency users may eventually want to stick with, Coinizy will provide them frictionless cashout options for it.

In an email response to EconoTimes, Losbar spoke about the journey so far, cryptocurrencies and their future, Ethereum’s popularity and much more.

1. Coinizy recently announced the full launch of its exchange services, following six months of the initial public beta period. How would you describe the journey so far, in terms of product development?

YL: It has been six exciting months, which enabled us to assess the reliability of our innovative « Bitcoin to PayPal » model that rely on a third party to process the payments since PayPal doesn’t cooperate directly with Bitcoin Business for unknown reasons.

On the other side, we switched our debit card provider in mid-march, which was initially Prepaid Financial Services and is now WaveCrest Global. While most of the bitcoin industry is now using the same issuing bank than us, we made a major differentiating move by deciding to lower significantly the retail price of our cards, since we think that the main area of interest for this product isn’t the rich countries where $18 debit cards might be affordable, but emerging ones. 

Indeed, we have seen, for example, a tremendous interest in our virtual VISA debit cards offering from countries like Morocco and Argentina where only 1% of the population currently owns an international debit/credit card. These populations have been de facto banned from online e-commerce for ages, which is ridiculous… 

2. At a time when the financial sector is showing increasing interest in blockchain technology, Coinizy believes in the promise of cryptocurrencies. What potential do you see in cryptocurrencies and where do you see the cryptocurrency ecosystem in the next 5-10 years?

YL: Just like the previous point I highlighted, I do think that crypto-currencies have been a fantastic opportunity for various populations to join the global market Internet is. We see very often testimonials in different bitcoin forums from people who were able to purchase digital goods online thanks to Bitcoin, after many years without having the ability to do so. This recent example is particularly interesting: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4jbsw2/my_teen_cousin_finally_found_a_way_to_bypass/ 

3. Ether, in particular, has emerged as a prominent cryptocurrency with Ethereum’s market cap taking the second position after bitcoin. Coinizy also launched the world’s first Ethereum debit card. In your opinion, what are the reasons for the recent popularity of Ethereum?

YL: Bitcoin already offers serious possibilities to create various kind of smart contract such as multi-signature addresses that need the signature of at least M persons out of a total pool of N individuals who have a signing right in order to initiate a payment. However, Ethereum went far beyond that point, by enabling Turing-complete applications to be built within the Ethereum network thanks to the powerful Solidity language - the same one used to write the now famous «TheDao» project. Along with this technological interest, there’s also the usual cohort of speculators, that were particularly impressed that such key player as Vitalik Buterin went on to create his own crypto-currency, after years of active contribution in the Bitcoin space.

4. Besides Bitcoin and Ethereum, are there any other plans to add support for other digital currencies? 

YL: We don’t have any other plans for additional crypto-currencies integration yet, since we want to focus on those who are being used on a daily basis for real transactional purposes, unlike the several altcoins whose only usage is entirely speculative.

5. What other exciting announcements can we expect this year?

YL: We are definitely looking closely to DAOs experiments, which can lead to very important changes within the crypto-ecosystem. This is just the beginning!