The 30-year-old CEO of Melcoin, a crypto asset and blockchain business in the Mercari Group, talks about the company's past and future.
Mercari, which has been involved in flea market apps and payment services, why did you decide to get involved in the crypto asset business?
Keita Nakamura (Nakamura): Because we saw great potential in technologies such as crypto assets and blockchain. At the same time, I also had a sense of crisis that these technologies might be disruptive to the business that Mercari had built up.
What were the potentials you sensed?
NAKAMURA: Firstly, there was the expectation that cryptographic assets such as Bitcoin (BTC) would come to be handled as the native currency of the Internet in the future, and that the financial world would undergo major changes. If this happens, the Mercari Group, which is involved in payment and financial businesses centred on Melpay, will not be able to remain unaffected by this change.
Another is that the decentralised worldview of blockchain will give rise to new ecosystems and business models.
As you know, Mercari is a marketplace for customers to buy and sell things, so we are in the middle of a centralised business model. That's why we had a sense of crisis that our business would one day be shaken to its foundations if we didn't follow the paradigm shift of a decentralised worldview expanding in the future.
So, at the time when we set up an internal research and development organisation called mercari R4D in 2017, we began to treat as a major theme how the Mercari Group handles and can utilise technologies such as crypto assets and blockchain.
▶︎ Decentralised
meaning de-centralised, decentralised or distributed, is one of the characteristics of blockchain. Opposite of ‘centralised’, which means centralised.