The global payments industry processes trillions of dollars of transactions every year, but the infrastructure that supports most of that volume was built for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. The legacy banking rails that rely on centralized institutions, defined operation hours and geography-dependent settlement windows are becoming out of sync with how modern trade actually moves. The debate over what is a substitute, or at least a complement, has been going on for years. Cryptocurrency, long an obscure experiment, is now near the heart of that conversation.
The constant obstacle has been merchant adoption. Global crypto ownership has reached over 741 million people, and consumer desire for spending digital assets on ordinary products and services has expanded consistently. But merchants have been slower to sign on, turned off by concerns over volatility, unfamiliar technology and a lack of accessible infrastructure to connect their existing point-of-sale systems to crypto payment rails. That friction has created a gap, and a certain fintech startup has moved in to fill it.
Joshua Tate’s approach to the problem was born of experience, not theory. Tate is a technologist by evolution, a real estate entrepreneur by practice, and a lawyer by profession who lived and worked for years in different countries before cofounding ForumPay. Those years overseas offered him a street-level understanding of how fragmented global financial institutions really are in practice, how movement of money across borders remains cumbersome and costly in ways that have less to do with technology than with entrenched institutional design. He discovered blockchain and started to look at its properties as a ledger system, and the applicability to payments was evident. There was no merchant-facing infrastructure to make it practicable.
ForumPay was born to build that infrastructure. It runs its own cryptocurrency exchange and pulls real-time price feeds from major exchanges, enabling it to guarantee merchants the best possible rate at the time of every transaction. No matter which cryptocurrency the buyer pays with, the merchant receives a settlement in their preferred fiat currency. It’s not their duty to handle the volatility that has made merchants hesitant to accept crypto, by design.
ForumPay takes such exposure in the exchange layer. The commercial model is simple. There are no setup costs, no monthly fees and no hidden charges. Merchants pay a single all-inclusive fee per transaction and nothing else. No chargebacks. No fraud liability. No PCI-DSS compliance load. Those eliminations are a substantial structural difference from conventional card processing for merchants already operating on razor tight margins.
The platform links to merchants wherever they are selling. ForumPay interacts natively with popular e-commerce platforms and supports in-store hardware through a dedicated device packed with its payment system. More recently, the business has expanded its capabilities into in-app payments following a US court ruling that forces Apple to allow iOS developers to offer alternative payment alternatives outside of its own ecosystem. ForumPay merchants may now execute crypto transactions directly in an app without diverting the user at checkout. The business has now included subscription billing, allowing merchants to accept recurring crypto payments for memberships and other ongoing services.
Tate talks about the company’s vision in terms of infrastructure, rather than product, a distinction he holds deliberately. Payment gateways transfer money. Payment infrastructure dictates the terms under which money can travel at all, across borders, between currencies, and across the ever-growing chasm between old finance and digital assets. His stated goal for the years ahead is on expanding those core rails, building capabilities around tap-to-pay in crypto and other features that link digital asset payments with current consumer patterns rather than forcing consumers to adjust to new ones.
His career, as a whole, displays a persistent attitude towards finding the right people for hard issues and building around them. The payments space rewards that approach. The technical and regulatory complexity of operating a crypto payment infrastructure company across multiple jurisdictions requires depth across legal, financial, and engineering domains simultaneously. Tate’s expertise in law, real estate and technology before arriving in fintech gave him an unusually broad frame for constructing such teams.
The merchant opportunity is still evolving. However, the direction is clear enough that hesitation is becoming its own kind of risk.
