The Electronic Transactions Association once predicted a wave of Bitcoin partnerships. It never came.

Back in 2014, Jason Oxman, then-CEO of the Electronic Transactions Association, made a bold call. Traditional electronic payment companies, he said, were waking up to Bitcoin’s disruptive potential. Partnerships between legacy payment firms and Bitcoin startups weren’t just possible, they were inevitable.

The Napster analogy and the one deal that existed

Oxman compared Bitcoin’s potential to Napster’s impact on the music industry. To back up the argument, he pointed to the Global Payments-BitPay referral agreement as proof that traditional firms were already dipping their toes in. BitPay, notably, was the ETA’s sole Bitcoin-focused member at the time.

One partnership. One Bitcoin member out of 500-plus companies. In hindsight, calling that a trend was generous.

The ETA had shown some early interest in the space. In 2013, the association hosted an event featuring Bitcoin Foundation legal counsel Patrick Murck.

What actually happened next

Oxman departed the ETA in February 2019. During his tenure, the predicted wave of Bitcoin-payment partnerships never materialized in any meaningful way.

As of 2025, there have been no significant announcements regarding ETA partnerships with Bitcoin startups. The organization hasn’t made public statements indicating a renewed focus on Bitcoin initiatives.

What the ETA and its member companies did do was pivot. The broader payments industry moved toward stablecoins and digital assets more generally, sidestepping Bitcoin’s volatility problem in favor of assets designed to behave more like the dollars they already understood.

The bigger picture for Bitcoin and traditional finance

Instead of payments companies partnering with Bitcoin startups, Bitcoin carved out its niche primarily as a store of value and investment asset rather than a payment rail. Meanwhile, PayPal launched its own stablecoin, and Visa and Mastercard built infrastructure for stablecoin settlements. The traditional payments industry didn’t partner with Bitcoin startups so much as it built parallel crypto capabilities in-house.

Bitcoin’s role in the financial ecosystem has grown enormously since 2014, just not in the way Oxman envisioned. It became a macro asset, a portfolio diversifier, and eventually the subject of spot ETFs approved by the SEC. What it didn’t become, at least not yet, is a standard component of the traditional electronic payments stack.

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