Bitcoin Magazine
Paystand: The Payments Giants Quietly Supporting Bitcoin Circular Economies
While many hyper focus on the bitcoin price and its occasional intense volatility, there is a whole cohort of Bitcoiners that are quietly building Bitcoin circular economies with deep social impact around the world, in areas where Bitcoin is a save heaven asset today, compared to the local economies and circumstances.One such company is Paystand, a B2B payments giant that has gone under the radar as a major user of Bitcoin for domestic and international corporate payments. Paystand enables companies to handle receivables, payables, expenses, cross-border payments, issue corporate spend cards, and streamlines payroll dynamics with Bitcoin-sensitive accounting software. Paystand serves mid to large corporate clients like Motorola.
By using Bitcoin as a financial settlement layer via its assurety protocol, Paystand provides fast, auditable, traceable transfers, serving as an alternative to legacy systems like checks, wires, and ACH. According to its CEO, Jeremy Almond, who talked to Bitcoin Magazine on the matter, the company has processed over $20 billion in payment volume per year and connects more than one million businesses on its network.
Almond, who co-founded Paystand, is a Bitcoin early adopter whose family was deeply affected by the 2008 financial crisis. In an interview with Frank Corva of Bitcoin Magazine, Almond shared some of his experiences with the Occupy Wall Street protest against the banks at the time and how all of this influenced his master’s thesis on “Why banks are too big to fail,” which in turn led him to Bitcoin. Almond has a deep background in tech entrepreneurship, while also being a surfer, which puts him in the company of other Bitcoin leaders who catch waves, like Jack Dorsey or Bitcoin Beach’s Mike Peterson.
Bitcoin’s deep integration with Paystand is subtle. The company focuses on solving operational and payment related problems for large corporations, using Bitcoin’s world class volume and payments infrastructure in the background, it is not generally known as Bitcoin company, though it nevertheless is advancing Bitcoin adoption in very interesting ways.
On the Bitcoin corporate front, Paystand takes a very different approach than companies like Michael Saylor’s Strategy, which walk through the front door to pitch a Bitcoin treasury allocation to executive boards, looking to influence companies from the top down. Paystand takes a very different strategy. Through its Teampay corporate spending cards, companies can earn Bitcoin rewards—denominated in satoshis—on everyday expenditures, such as a 1% cash back in sats.
As Almond explained, “Our products are designed to sort of Trojan horse and orange pill large companies that might be skeptical to go all in on Bitcoin first… all of a sudden that company ends up with Bitcoin in the balance sheet, not by some big formal process, but by si
