Will Bitcoin do to banks and payment services what email did for the post office?

Ahead of UN:BLOCK 2025, The Paypers sat down with Ido Greenberg, CEO of Green Coin, to explore how Web 3 payments are redefining the way we transact and what role Green Coin plays in this transformation.

Green Coin is an arm of my activities on the Blockchain revolution and evaluation. I was an entrepreneur and consultant for many years (and still am) and after a big exit in a cyber security company we created in 2017, I met blockchain and went into the rabbit hole. Our focus is on narrowing the gap and making crypto more accessible for both individuals and initiations. We consult, educate, invest, and do some founding initiatives in this new fascinating world.

Global digital energy.

Running from risk, from the past, from less secure to more secure and less risky.

Wealth distribution globally is changing and payments with it.

If they want to avoid what email did to the post office, they have no choice but to adapt. Let me be clear—I’m pro-regulation. Regulation creates the market, brings crypto into the mainstream, and is ultimately the path forward. I’ve seen this play out before. Twenty years ago, it was renewable energy—also a bottom-up movement, much like crypto today. The same thing happened in cybersecurity, especially within finance, which was our primary focus. Banks will need to follow both market demand and regulatory momentum in adopting this groundbreaking technology.

We’re already seeing the first phase unfold: banks stepping in as custodians and validators. The next phase? Potentially launching their own coins.

AI is on the rise, and it’s being built on digital capital. Payments in the AI economy will be digital—AI doesn’t carry credit cards or open bank accounts, yet it’s set to drive a USD 100 trillion economy. Digital commerce will evolve with it, and traditional banking systems will either adapt or become obsolete.

We’re on the verge of a world where 40,000 banks engage in always-on, secure, instant payments—available to everyone. For the first time in history, billions of dollars could move between them every hour, powered entirely by a digital energy system.

It's a total change of trust issue. It won't only abolish the middleman and provide less cost with more connectivity. But the main issue is in the application layer. Imagine you buy a new phone. It doesn’t matter which brand, but imagine that this phone costs you USD 1000, and it’s better than an iPhone—way better. It’s loaded up with all the apps you expect, but they are better than the Apple equivalents.

Now, imagine that all of this happens without any centralised entity collecting your personal data. It’s all encrypted and it all lives on the Solana or Sui blockchain. Not only that, but all the apps are super cheap and usually free. The only catch is that you spend about USD 3/month on SOL which you need in order to use these apps. How is this possible? Well, the entire point of blockchains is to have a globally shared state that can be accessed by anyone at any time. Imagine if all the Web 2 tech companies shared a single database and could integrate all their apps together to give you a seamless user experience across all of them. Look what’s meta is doing, what google is doing in blockchain. This is closer than you think.

Changing money means changing society and as such most traditional institutions are afraid of this change. People in nature, are afraid of every evolution - this is history. Any change is hard.

Green Coin mitigates this fear. We do it via education as well by providing smart tools to our customers (such as the SAGE project, which offers an algo trade that guards the user). Onboarding and offboarding are still the main challenges. The adoption rate of Bitcoin compared to Internet adoption shows that we are at the same rate. I’m optimistic.

You’ll soon be attending UN:BLOCK 2025—what excites you most about this event, and why should payments professionals make it a priority to attend?

I’m excited to go back to Riga, a place I lived shortly in the past and love.

I’m excited about Latvia’s ability to tap into the market and meet people who share the industry values. Payment professionals will find the opportunity to meet people and projects that can transform their operation to the current age.

About Ido Greenberg Wald

With more than 20 years of innovation and leadership and helping five startups to take them as high as possible, I am always excited about our human innovations and their impact.