Joshua Tate, Co-founder and CEO of ForumPay, on A Ledger Without Borders

In the years since blockchain technology moved from academic white paper to commercial reality, the debate around its most practical application has largely resolved itself. The speculative narratives that dominated early coverage have given way to something more grounded: a growing focus on cryptocurrency’s potential use in payments. Not as a replacement for every financial instrument in existence, but as an alternative payment infrastructure designed to improve speed and accessibility for moving value across the boundaries that traditional banking systems have always struggled with. Geography. Time zones. Correspondent banking chains. Intermediary fees. These are not technological problems, but institutional ones, and crypto addresses them at the architecture level.

The payments industry has been slow to absorb that implication fully, but the companies operating at that intersection have not. A new category of fintech infrastructure provider has emerged specifically to connect the crypto ecosystem to the existing merchant economy, allowing businesses to accept digital assets without taking on the complexity or volatility that once made the prospect impractical.

From Law to Blockchain

ForumPay operates within this category, and its co-founder and CEO Joshua Tate came to build it through a path that was more circuitous than most. He studied and practiced law, spent years in real estate, and then made a deliberate pivot into technology in 2017. Living across multiple continents gave him a practical education in the inadequacy of legacy financial rails for international commerce. Cross-border transactions that should be simple can be slower and more costly because of infrastructure built around national banking systems that were never designed to interoperate efficiently. When Tate encountered blockchain and began to understand its properties seriously, he saw in it a structural answer to a problem he had observed firsthand. The missing piece was merchant-side infrastructure built to make that answer accessible.

Neutralizing Volatility at the Point of Sale

ForumPay’s technical foundation reflects that framing. The company owns and operates its own cryptocurrency exchange, which aggregates live price feeds from major exchanges to identify a competitive available rate at the time of each transaction. Merchants receive settlement in their preferred fiat currency regardless of the crypto used to pay, meaning the volatility that has long discouraged merchant participation may be reduced before it affects the business. The customer pays in whichever supported cryptocurrency they hold. The merchant receives dollars, euros, or pounds. The exchange layer handles everything in between.

ForumPay is wallet-agnostic and broadly integrated. The infrastructure connects to major e-commerce environments and supports in-store transactions through dedicated hardware. Following a U.S. court ruling that required Apple to allow developers greater freedom to direct users to alternative payment options, ForumPay extended its functionality to support full in-app crypto checkout, completing the transaction within the app environment without interrupting the customer purchase flow. The company has also built out subscription billing capabilities, giving merchants a mechanism to collect recurring crypto payments for services, memberships, and digital products on flexible billing cycles.

Merchant Economics, Simplified

The commercial structure is deliberately accessible. According to ForumPay, its service has no setup fees or ongoing charges. The company says merchants pay a single per-transaction fee and are not responsible for chargebacks, fraud liability, or card-network compliance costs.

Tate describes the company’s ambition in terms of infrastructure rather than features. The product roadmap includes tap-to-pay functionality in crypto and continued development of payment behaviors that meet consumers where they already are rather than asking them to adopt new ones. His long-term focus is on the foundational layer of cross-border financial connectivity, the rails beneath the transaction rather than the transaction itself.

A Portfolio That Spends Like Cash

In fact, Tate’s long-term vision extends past merchant checkout to the point of sale itself. He envisions a future where a customer’s entire portfolio, crypto, equities, other liquid holdings, functions as spendable currency, so that a major purchase like a home or car no longer requires instructing a broker to sell specific shares and wire the proceeds. Instead, a tokenized slice of the portfolio settles instantly at the transaction. In that world, idle assets stop sitting on the sidelines, and everything a person owns becomes usable the moment they need it. Tate believes ForumPay has developed infrastructure intended to make that approach practical.

The People Problem Behind the Product

Tate has described his core expertise as identifying talented people and building the right teams around hard problems. In a space that demands simultaneous fluency across regulatory, financial, and technical domains, that capacity matters as much as any individual technical capability. ForumPay operates across multiple jurisdictions, and the complexity of doing so at scale is not a product problem. It is a people and infrastructure problem.

That, ultimately, is the bet Tate has made: that the future of global commerce runs on better rails, and that the company that builds them does not need to be the loudest one in the room, it just needs to be there when the rest of the world catches up.

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