6 questions for the 20-year-old founder of Selix, Daniel Servade

Daniel Servadei is only 20 years old, but he's the mastermind behind Celix, a two-year-old e-commerce platform that helps businesses around the world streamline the process of accepting cryptocurrency payments.

In the year Launched by Servadei in November 2021 from its home in Reggio Emilia, Italy, Celix supports payments using traditional fiat and more than 25 currencies. Serveday estimates that it has processed more than $100 million in payments worldwide to date, to more than 3,000 customers in nearly three dozen countries.

Cointelegraph spoke to Servadei – who is currently studying for a computer science degree at the University of Parma – to ask about his work and his views on the future of the industry. “Building a company is 1,000 times more difficult than working with cryptocurrency,” Servadei said. “It wasn't easy trying to balance my life, my company, going to school at the time.”

Table of Contents

Toggle

1) Tell us about your company.

Basically, we're trying to do what Stripe does for fiat – we're trying to do it for cryptocurrency. It is a centralized payment platform. Anyone can sign up and start accepting cryptocurrency payments instantly, and we'll make it happen.

2) From decentralized applications (dApps) to fickle tokens (NFTs) and decentralized finance (DeFi), we've seen many “killer applications” for crypto, but none have really taken off yet. What sticks?

The main issue with the crypto industry is that there are many solutions to non-existent problems. It's the first thing. Another thing is that those solutions are not taking a consumer-first approach. They are building projects that could be amazing, but they don't care about their users.

NFTs are here to stay – and I can see them having many good uses in the future. One of the main use cases I see for NFTs is the public blockchain and the ability for people – players, traders – to trade easily.

And with Celex, we're seeing an increase in payments across cryptocurrencies. More than 40% of the payments we process online are in crypto rather than fiat. We've seen the number of payments you have in cryptocurrency payments just keep increasing. If someone pays in PayPal, 6-7% goes to the fees. With crypto you have nothing but standard blockchain payments.

3) What is the toughest challenge you have faced in this industry?

The most difficult thing for Celix is ​​that we work with 25 cryptocurrencies, and each one is different. Each of them is more difficult to implement compared to the others. That's all that matters to us. How to implement them and so on – that was not the most difficult part. The difficult part was how to separate them.

From a personal perspective, I was 18 years old when I created Celix and still going through high school. The number of issues in building a company is crazy. A bank account from anywhere – banks in Italy so we were out of business for a month, shall we say, not good. When I was in school, I was called in bathrooms with lawyers. A lot has happened, and since this is the first company I've built, there have been a lot of new things for me. Basically everything I do is new. So I'm learning about the issues we have. Building a company is 1,000 times harder than working with cryptocurrency. It wasn't easy trying to balance my life, my company, going to school at the time.

4) What is the biggest trend in blockchain in the next 12 months?

I think what's really going to happen is increasing adoption in traditional finance. It will be interesting to see if ETFs evolve, and if they do, everyone who works with ETFs will now be against cryptocurrencies. I think we'll see NFTs go beyond art – games and such.

EFF approval is a game changer, because once you bring institutional players into cryptocurrency, regulation follows. And that's what this industry needs – clear guidelines. You can't build a good program if you don't know what you can and can't do. A regulatory environment will bring more and better crypto companies.

5) Which countries do you believe are doing the most to support blockchain?

Europe and Saudi Arabia are doing the most. Europe because their new and final rules will be in June this year. We will have a guide on all things crypto related.

The Middle East is doing a lot of different projects and different things for cryptocurrencies as well. Other countries – El Salvador, Argentina and so on – are adopting Bitcoin (BTC) as legal tender, but I don't see them having as much impact as the Middle East and Europe.

6) Which top twitter accounts do you follow?

Tether, a stablecoin. Back to Blockstream and its founder, Adam. And the other is TERO, a member of Liquidity Board, a sidechain of Bitcoin. He's working on a couple of things with us at Celex.

Subscribe

A very engaging read in Blockchain. It is given once a week.

Editorial staff

Cointelegraph magazine writers and reporters contributed to this article.