A Conversation with Felix Stein, Founder and CEO of CryptoWoo

WordPress is among the most popular platforms used today for blogs and websites. Customization is a big draw, as users can choose from a variety of themes and plugins to suit their aesthetic preferences and business needs. For many business owners, running alongside their WordPress site is an e-commerce platform called WooCommerce. Similar to WordPress, WooCommerce offers plugins that allow owners to achieve their business goals.

The plugin CryptoWoo brings WordPress and WooCommerce together with cryptocurrency payments. CryptoWoo allows sites to accept payments made with bitcoin, litecoin and dogecoin. According to the company’s website, the plugin pulls live exchange rates and doesn’t require middleman fees.

CoinReport had the pleasure to speak with Felix Stein, founder and CEO of CryptoWoo. In our email interview below, Felix gives an overview of the plugin and the advantages it offers for businesses looking to work with cryptocurrencies.

CoinReport: Can you give us a background on your experience in the technology and bitcoin industries?

CryptoWoo founder & CEO Felix Stein

Felix: I am an autodidact and have been programming with WordPress, Typo3, and other CMSs for more than five years. I discovered bitcoin in 2012 and have been closely following the development of the technology and the ecosystem ever since.

CoinReport: What made you decide to pursue a cryptocurrency integration?

Felix: Most of the existing solutions for accepting cryptocurrencies turned out to be more about switching out the middlemen instead of getting rid of them altogether. The main driver for me is that I can enable people to use this technology in better alignment with its main principles: permissionlessness, censorship resistance and trustlessness.

CoinReport: Can you tell us more about the features of CryptoWoo? Why would people want to use the plugin?

Felix: Apart from the native support for currently three different currencies and the deep integration with the WooCommerce platform, CryptoWoo gives merchants a way to actually take control of their payments by reducing the influence of third parties to a minimum or even eliminate it completely. The whole process happens in the store, no customer data is shared with other entities and the merchant is in control of the private keys at all times.

Merchants have fine-grained control over the exchange rates, the payment processing and many other aspects to adapt the plugin behavior to [fit] their needs and risk profile. They can choose between different block explorer APIs, customize the timeout behavior and accept unconfirmed transactions based on transaction confidence metrics.

Starting with our next release, merchants will also be able to connect their store to any Insight API instance, BitPay’s open source block explorer API. Combined with our HD Wallet add-on, this new feature will make the whole process truly independent from any third party.

CoinReport: How has reception been so far? Have you seen mostly merchants use the plugin along with traditional payment gateways? Have some businesses taken advantage of the working exclusively with cryptocurrencies?

Felix: There is currently no other solution that offers the same set of features, so CryptoWoo has been received very well by merchants, especially by those who care about their own and their customers’ privacy. [However]… merchants who want to accumulate cryptocurrency and who don’t need to immediately exchange their sales revenue to fiat currency are [also] welcoming the opportunity to take matters into their own hands.

A great example [is] the guys from keys4coins.com, who have been using CryptoWoo since the first alpha release. They are accepting exclusively cryptocurrencies and the only information collected from customers is the email address where the game keys are automatically delivered after payment.

Even though the custodial cryptocurrency payment processors are helping adoption a great deal, the continuously decreasing volatility and the rising awareness [of] privacy and control aspects make more and more merchants feel increasingly [confident] about accepting and holding the coins themselves.

In this changing environment, CryptoWoo is working with the goal to provide these merchants with a way to use the technology more like it is meant to be.

Images courtesy of CryptoWoo