ETA's Jason Oxman: Bitcoin's Not Our Enemy, It's Just Another Flavor of Digital Transaction 🍴

The Electronic Transactions Association (ETA), the trade body representing Visa, MasterCard, Amazon and PayPal, has signaled it intends to deepen ties with Bitcoin startups following the August 6 admission of Atlanta-based BitPay as the first virtual currency company to join its ranks. In an interview with CoinDesk, ETA CEO Jason Oxman said the membership reflected a wider openness to innovation rather than an endorsement of any single technology, while the ETA's own press release said members should expect "more such partnerships as the payments industry innovates for the future."

Oxman stressed that the organization had taken no formal position for or against $BTC, framing its mission as supporting any electronic transaction a customer and merchant agree to use. "At bottom, our industry is in the business of facilitating electronic transactions, and those electronic transactions are going to take the form of whatever the customer or merchant of choice agrees is going to be the form of their electronic transaction," Oxman said. He credited the Bitcoin Foundation with helping shift perceptions inside the group, pointing to a 2013 ETA event where the Foundation's general counsel, Patrick Murck, outlined the business case for the technology. "[Murck] did a good job of putting a business-focused backing to bitcoin. With that kind of introduction, our members look to bitcoin as an interesting development in the industry, and at least one of our members has seen fit to strike a deal with a bitcoin processor," Oxman said.

Commenting on New York's BitLicense proposal, Oxman said the ETA historically focused on keeping regulators from prematurely restricting emerging payment methods, noting the same dynamic played out when PayPal was new. He added that heightened regulatory scrutiny is normal for early-stage systems: "In the world of new payments technologies, any regulators are going to ask questions about the level of consumer protection available through alternative payment systems. The less those systems are established and deployed, the more regulators are going to feel compelled to step in and protect consumers where those protections are not otherwise available."

Oxman reiterated that partnership decisions will continue to be driven by member demand rather than ideology, and that the BitPay deal is being treated as a proof of concept rather than a broader endorsement of $BTC.