CoinGeek Backstage: Bitcoin Association’s Patrick Prinz on sparking BSV adoption in Europe

In May 2020, Bitcoin Association announced that it had become a non-profit association in Zug, Switzerland. Shortly after, Patrick Prinz joined the association as its first Europe and Operations Manager. Since then, he has been working to build operations and promote BSV blockchain adoption in the European region. He joined CoinGeek Backstage to talk about his role at Bitcoin Association, working to make Bitcoin SV the leader in Europe and what the future holds for the industry.

Prinz joined Bitcoin Association in July 2020, following a career as a strategy consultant for firms including Citibank and PwC. “My role initially was focused on building the operations,” he told CoinGeek’s Patrick Thompson.

Aside from being operations manager, Prinz also serves as the Europe lead for Bitcoin Association. “With this I try to increasingly focus on adoption in Europe. I work with a lot of enterprises, I engage with authorities, regulators and obviously I’m there for developers and regular enthusiasts.”

Prinz acknowledged the great leaps digital currencies have made in the past few years. However, the focus for a vast majority of digital currency projects has been on price speculation. This ultimately takes away from all the transformational aspects of the industry.

“I’d love to see more work on discovering what Bitcoin Script is capable of—building business models on top of the protocol rather than reinventing the wheel,” he told CoinGeek.

As Bitcoin Association’s operations manager, Prinz is highly involved in the projects the organization embarks on, especially in regard to promoting BSV adoption. For him, one region he sees the most potential in is the Middle East. As CoinGeek reported, the Association is set to launch a new Bitcoin SV Hub in Dubai to foster innovation and BSV adoption.

Prinz pointed out that the Middle East, alongside Africa, is focused on using Bitcoin SV to solve challenges, not as a speculative asset. He foresees these regions becoming critical to the future of not just Bitcoin SV, but the blockchain sector as well.

Despite blockchain being a relatively new technology, Prinz called on more developers to experiment with it, to “test and try, and be willing to invest time to learn, that’s the most critical thing.”