When Ben Weiss sat on his bed looking at his bitcoin wallet nearly a decade ago, something profound clicked.
“I was looking at my wallet, looking at bitcoin in my wallet, and I thought, wait, if I have this bitcoin, it is physically impossible for my roommate to have the same exact bitcoin,” Weiss explained.
This realization about digital scarcity sparked something.
“The digital world’s going to be as big, if not bigger than the physical world, and here’s a natural currency for the digital world, a way to have ownership and scarcity of an asset on the internet,” Weiss recalled of that pivotal moment.
This epiphany set Weiss on a path to co-found CoinFlip, now one of the largest crypto kiosk companies globally with over 5,500 machines across 10 countries.
Founded with his high school friend Daniel Polotsky and two others, CoinFlip represents a curious paradox in the crypto world.
“Our business is such a dichotomy,” Weiss explains.
“We’re a crypto company, we’re a tech company, we’re pretty forward-leaning, but we spend a lot of our time dealing with gas stations, dealing with physical cash, dealing with armored car companies, dealing with malls.”
The journey wasn’t smooth. CoinFlip faced existential challenges repeatedly from an unexpected source: banking relationships.
Weiss explained his company’s bank accounts were terminated without explanation in the past.
“We were debanked probably hundreds of times.” Weiss revealed. “They’d give us the cash or a check, and we would have around a week or two to find another bank.”
In the early days, the founders even collected cash themselves from kiosks scattered across Chicago neighborhoods; no armored car companies would work with them.
These challenges forged a resilient business model that has since expanded to Canada, Mexico, Panama, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, and Spain.
What Weiss and his team discovered was that while Bitcoin is inherently digital, physical touchpoints remain crucial for adoption. Each market requires a hyper-local approach.
“Each market is almost like a new startup,” Weiss said. “In some ways that makes the business very fun because I felt like we’ve gone through seven different startup phases now with different markets.”
The company has witnessed firsthand how digital assets serve different needs globally.
In countries like Mexico and South Africa, where inflation runs rampant and banking access is limited, stablecoins have become essential financial tools.
“Being in some of these other countries where 40% of the population may be unbanked or where inflation is 30-40%, and we see people protecting their wealth whether in Bitcoin or stablecoins,” Weiss shared.
He’s observed an unexpected symbiosis between digital assets and traditional finance.
“Four or five years ago there was this mindset of , ‘Oh, is bitcoin going to replace the dollar?’ But it’s actually super symbiotic.
“A lot of these countries with stablecoins are essentially accessing and holding the dollar in a way that they couldn’t ever before, and also at a speed and with a level of security that they couldn’t do before.”
Weiss, who sports a Bitcoin tattoo and considers himself “a Bitcoin maximalist in a way,” acknowledges the complementary roles different cryptocurrencies can play.
“Bitcoin can be your digital gold, Bitcoin can be your savings account, but maybe stablecoins are your checking account,” he explained.
The regulatory landscape has improved with the new administration, but challenges remain.
“The most egregious parts of debanking have stopped, but there’s still plenty of banks that will not bank crypto companies,” Weiss noted.
He emphasized the importance of the industry’s self-regulation to preempt restrictive government policies: “The more you self-police, the less the government comes with a heavy hand.”
When asked what he would ask Bitcoin’s mysterious creator Satoshi Nakamoto if given the chance, Weiss first joked, “Who are you?” before adding he’d be curious about Satoshi’s original vision.
“Was his vision really as a payment or as an asset? And I’d be curious to see what he thinks of the current state of crypto.”
For aspiring entrepreneurs interested in the digital asset space, Weiss offered some encouragement:
“If anyone’s reading the article who’s ever thought of starting their own business, give it a shot. There are so many areas where innovation is needed. I don’t think there are too many people in Bitcoin who are focused on the physical aspect.”
His final advice reflects the leap of faith that transformed his bedroom Bitcoin epiphany into a global company:
“What looks niche today can be a huge opportunity tomorrow. No matter how much analysis you do, no matter how many business plans you write, it’s all sort of a leap of faith at the end.”
For Ben and his team, what began as a moment of clarity in a college apartment has since evolved into a bridge between the physical and digital worlds of finance.
They are now helping thousands across ten countries access the future of money, one kiosk transaction at a time.
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