Stacy has been working in the blockchain sphere since 2016. She has worked as a marketing consultant for businesses who wanted to integrate blockchain. She has worked with trading platforms, DeFi projects and has worked in Indonesia, Malaysia, South Africa & South Korea. The Calypso Group are mainly focused on Calypso Pay. Calypso Pay is a crypto payment processor. They released several financial products for different business segments. Their global aim is to help business seamlessly adopt crypto (dive into Web3)
Stacy has been working in the blockchain sphere since 2016. She has worked as a marketing consultant for businesses who wanted to integrate blockchain. She has worked with trading platforms, DeFi projects and has worked in Indonesia, Malaysia, South Africa & South Korea. The Calypso Group are mainly focused on Calypso Pay. Calypso Pay is a crypto payment processor. They released several financial products for different business segments. Their global aim is to help business seamlessly adopt crypto (dive into Web3)
Transcription
Pemo: Welcome, Stacy. So great to have you on the show today. I’m really interested in hearing about Calypso and what you guys do and how you do it.
Stacy Komarova: Hi Pemo, thanks for having me here. I would love to tell you about Calypso Pay, some more information.
Pemo: Great.
Stacy Komarova: Yeah. Let me start with introducing the company. The company is called Calypso Group and it emerged in September 2022 with two more companies WatchData and WatchBlock. We integrated into one company, which is now called Calypso Group, but the main company we are focused on right now is Calypso Pay, the crypto payment processor.
Pemo: Great because we can always … We all need help with payments, so great that you’re involved in that. What’s been your experience of being in the crypto domain as a woman? Obviously it’s more boys than girls. I’ve been involved for a long time, since 2008, so I know.
Stacy Komarova: Wow. From 2008,
Pemo: Yeah, when Bitcoin was first discovered, I had a business in Dublin, in Ireland, and I’ve supported the ecosystem since just because I think women were underserved in those days by the incumbent banks. I pricked my ears up and went, “Wow, this is great. An alternate form of payment.”
Stacy Komarova: Wow. Yeah, that’s a great experience. You are almost from the time when Bitcoin was founded from the release of the white paper by Satoshi Nakamoti.
Pemo: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Stacy Komarova: I joined this sphere in 2014
Pemo: Okay.
Stacy Komarova: Yeah, I did marketing almost all the time and yeah, you are absolutely right that it’s mainly male domain. It’s mainly male business. Even when we do marketing right now, we see that the main people who respond to our advertisement are male and less female. I think that female really are underestimated because they can bring a lot of-
Pemo: Yeah.
Stacy Komarova: … yeah, really they can bring-
Pemo: I agree.
Stacy Komarova: … a lot of fresh air to this market because yeah, yeah. I’m joking, I like to joke that I bought Bitcoin when it was only $300. Yes. I used to be paid in Bitcoins all the time, practically all the time.
Pemo: Good work.
Stacy Komarova: Yeah. I was given my salary in crypto, and I remember those times when it was just $300.
Pemo: Yeah.
Stacy Komarova: That’s crazy.
Pemo: Yeah.
Stacy Komarova: Yeah. Talking about my current experience, I had during these years, I did marketing all the time. Sometimes it was marketing in the B2C sector when it was the trading platform, an exchange platform, and application for the crypto application for customers. I worked in different countries, I worked in the Philippines, I worked in Malaysia, almost in all Asian countries. We did the conferences, we did the networking. I also worked in South Africa and I worked with some European countries. I can say that I have a broad experience in crypto.
Pemo: Great. I’m really interested to know about Web3 and everyone’s got different perspectives on what that looks like, where we are headed. Obviously you’re right in the heart of it, really would be interested in what your experience of Web3 is and what it’s all about, what it looks like, the challenges and the gains, and how does this relate to the work that Calypso are doing?
Stacy Komarova: Yeah, the topic of Web3 is we can say now there is a lot of hype and some people use the notion of Web3 even with different meanings. Most people think that Web3 is just about crypto and blockchain, but it goes a bit further.
Pemo: Okay.
Stacy Komarova: Yeah.
Pemo: Can you talk a bit more about that?
Stacy Komarova: Yes. Well, we just released, actually, let me tell you, we just released a kind of big research on Web2 and Web3 and Web1 and all these definitions of Web1, Web2, Web3, and where we are now.
Pemo: Oh great.
Pemo: So maybe you could send it across to me so I can include it in the podcast.
Stacy Komarova: Yeah, sure. It is published in our blog on the website on Calypso Pay.
Pemo: Great.
Stacy Komarova: I will definitely send you, yeah.
Pemo: Thank you.
Stacy Komarova: But when we talk about Web3, it’s not only about cryptocurrency, it’s more about decentralized data, it’s more about transparency and it is about decentralization and transparency and this how we approach in Calypso for Web3. Now I can say that we not only give our customers access to Web3 by adopting crypto, but we also have Web3 from inside. We are the company that has Web3 outside as our products, as our crypto payment gateways for our customers, but we also have Web3 insight because we just released the core banking system, which is based on our internal blockchain. What our developers did, they did the same system, which is in Fiat World, the core banking system, but they did the same for crypto. I think this transition of the things that are in Fiat already adopted by everyone, that this transition to crypto is what we can say Web3 from the inside.
Pemo: Right.
Stacy Komarova: Yeah, and our personal blockchain, why we did it, because it will give great opportunities for our customers to save money on transaction fees because every blockchain has
Pemo: Yeah, yeah, the banks really charge like wounded bulls really for any foreign currency transfers. Yeah.
Stacy Komarova: Yeah, and what we will give to our customers is the access free from fees, from networking fees, inside our blockchain. I think this is a really great thing that we can do for our customers. That’s what we call Web3, because we are going to give the right to supervise the transactions, the proof of work and proof of stake and their different proofs. Our blockchain is based actually on the proof of authority.
Pemo: You’re basically targeting other merchants, so B2B, correct?
Stacy Komarova: Yeah, yeah. Currently, we’re working with Merchants. It is B2B, but we also release our product for B2C. It will be the application, the web application, which is called Atlas Wallet, and it will be available for any person to download from the App Store or from Google.
Pemo: Oh, great. Well good luck with that. I think that’s very necessary at the moment. Yeah, good work. Wow. Well, I’m really impressed and I wish you all the best. I’m sure you guys are going to do well. I like the fact that you’re focusing on transparency because at the moment in the crypto domain, definitely, we need more of that.
Stacy Komarova: Yeah, definitely.
Pemo: With all the fraud that’s happened. Thank you so much for contributing today and yeah, hopefully you can come back at some point and let us know how it all went.
Stacy Komarova: Yeah, thank you very much for having me. I hope that in some time, maybe in half a year, we can e-meet again and I will tell you about how the release went and how our customers like it, what are the drawbacks and maybe all the advantages of personal blockchain and every person should … Actually, one of the thoughts about Web3 is that the more personal blockchains like private blockchains appear, the better because it leads to decentralization like we had in Web1, when everyone could make their personal websites without any controlled application, controlled website like Google. There was no Google, there were no search engines, everyone had their own website. This, what we are approaching in Web3, in the terms of establishing private blockchains.
Pemo: Fabulous. Thank you so much, Stacy. Lovely to talk to you today and wishing you all the best with Calypso.
Stacy Komarova: Thank you very much, Pemo. See ya.
Pemo: Bye.