Joshua Tate, Cofounder and CEO of ForumPay
Joshua Tate, Cofounder and CEO of ForumPay

For most of commercial history, the architecture of payments has been invisible by design. Merchants accepted currency, banks settled balances, and the rails connecting them hummed quietly in the background, rarely examined and rarely questioned. That arrangement served a stable global economy for decades. But the emergence of cryptocurrency as a legitimate transactional medium has exposed the seams in that architecture, and the financial industry is now reckoning with what payment infrastructure actually needs to look like going forward.

The numbers signal a meaningful shift. More than 741 million people worldwide now hold some form of cryptocurrency, and a growing segment of that population is not holding it as a speculative asset. They want to spend it. Research indicates that more than a quarter of high-income consumers in the United States say they would be likely to switch merchants specifically to pay with crypto. The consumer demand is real. The gap, historically, has been on the merchant side.

Joshua Tate has spent the better part of a decade working to close that gap. As cofounder and CEO of ForumPay, a crypto payment infrastructure company headquartered in the payments technology space, Tate came to the industry from an unlikely direction. He began as a skeptic. It was only after studying the mechanics of blockchain as an immutable ledger, and recognizing the speed and efficiency of crypto rails relative to legacy financial systems, that his perspective shifted. What kept him engaged was not the asset class itself but the problem it pointed toward: money, for all its supposed universality, remains stubbornly local.

Tate's career path sharpened that observation. After earning his law degree from the University of Kansas School of Law in 2002 and practicing as an attorney, he moved into real estate in 2010 before transitioning into the technology sector in 2017. Stints living across the Caribbean and the Mediterranean reinforced what his legal and business work had already suggested: the global financial system is far more siloed than the global economy requires. Cross-border transactions remain slow, expensive, and disproportionately complicated by geography. Crypto, he concluded, offered a structural solution, provided the merchant adoption infrastructure existed to support it.

That infrastructure is what ForumPay set out to build. The company operates its own cryptocurrency exchange, aggregating price feeds from major exchanges in real time to deliver optimal rates at the moment of transaction. Merchants receive payment in their preferred fiat currency regardless of which cryptocurrency the customer uses, which effectively neutralizes the volatility concern that has historically made merchants reluctant to engage with digital assets. There are no setup fees, no chargebacks, no PCI-DSS compliance costs, and no ongoing fees beyond a single all-inclusive per-transaction rate.

The practical reach of the platform is broad. ForumPay integrates with major e-commerce environments including WooCommerce, Drupal, and Magento, and operates across online and in-store payment channels. A recent U.S. court ruling requiring Apple to ease restrictions on in-app payment systems opened an additional avenue for ForumPay merchants, who can now accept crypto directly within iOS applications without redirecting customers elsewhere during checkout. The company has also introduced recurring payment functionality, giving merchants the ability to manage subscription billing in crypto across memberships, services, and digital products.

Tate describes ForumPay's positioning deliberately: it is not a payment gateway but a payment infrastructure company. The distinction matters. Gateways process transactions. Infrastructure determines what kinds of transactions are possible, at what speed, at what cost, and for whom. His long-term focus is on expanding the foundational rails that support cross-border commerce, with the goal of making crypto payments as frictionless and intuitive as any conventional checkout experience.

When asked what advice he would offer to someone entering the payments or fintech space, Tate's answer reflects the same disposition that characterized his own entry into it. Stay curious, remain a student of the industry, and absorb perspective from every available source. It is the orientation, more than any particular credential or technical skill, that he credits for his ability to identify talented people and bring them together around solvable problems.

The broader payments industry is still early in its accommodation of crypto as a mainstream transactional tool. However the consumer base is there, the technology has matured, and the regulatory environment is slowly catching up. For merchants still weighing whether to engage, the calculus is becoming harder to dismiss.