David Parkinson, Founder & CEO of Musqet – Interview Series

David Parkinson, Founder & CEO of Musqet, is a fintech entrepreneur with a background spanning consulting, large-scale digital transformation, and payments innovation, who is now focused on bridging traditional finance with Bitcoin adoption. After leading major transformation initiatives at Sky—including OTT launches, payments infrastructure, and regulatory frameworks—along with senior roles at PwC and Ernst & Young, he shifted toward Bitcoin and macroeconomic education through Genesis Node before founding Musqet in 2023. His career reflects a consistent focus on operational efficiency, large-scale system design, and financial innovation, culminating in a mission to modernize payment infrastructure by enabling merchants to seamlessly accept both traditional card payments and Bitcoin within a unified ecosystem.

Musqet is a next-generation payment platform designed to unify card acquiring, ePOS systems, and Bitcoin transactions into a single, streamlined solution for merchants, enabling businesses to accept both fiat and digital currencies with minimal friction. The platform combines online and in-person payment processing with features such as cost-optimized routing, borderless transactions, and integrated treasury capabilities, allowing merchants to settle in either local currency or Bitcoin while reducing fees and improving efficiency. Positioned as a bridge between traditional financial systems and decentralized digital assets, Musqet aims to accelerate mainstream Bitcoin adoption by making it as simple and accessible as standard card payments, while also enabling new use cases such as Bitcoin payroll and long-term treasury management.

You spent years leading transformation and large-scale delivery initiatives at companies like Sky, PwC, and EY, and also founded Genesis Node to educate executives on Bitcoin and macroeconomics. What was the turning point that led you to launch Musqet, and how did those experiences shape your vision for building a borderless payments infrastructure?

The turning point was a PwC consulting project for the Mayor of London in 2014. I was tasked with saving the taxpayer £100 million across the Met Police, London Fire Brigade, TfL and the Olympic Park. A side project the client set me on was exploring whether the government could use Bitcoin to track supplier payments, ensuring no supply chain fraud was taking place and that non-London businesses were benefitting from capital infrastructure projects. It was a good idea but too early and too innovative at the time. But it changed the course of my life. The more I researched how Bitcoin works, how it incentivises renewable energy, how it creates a better economic system for humanity, the more I realised that Bitcoin adoption is inevitable but also necessary to protect humans from economic destruction against themselves.

Years leading transformation projects and consumer technology launches at Sky, PwC, and EY taught me how to deliver complex programmes inside large organisations. Genesis Node taught me how to communicate Bitcoin’s significance to executives. Musqet is where all of that converges, building the infrastructure that actually connects Bitcoin to everyday commerce and lays the foundation for the future of a digitally native money for AI.

Musqet is positioning itself as a bridge between traditional payment systems and Bitcoin-based infrastructure. What are the biggest technical and operational challenges in integrating these two worlds into a seamless merchant experience?

The biggest challenge is that these two worlds were never designed to talk to each other. Traditional card payment infrastructure that Visa, Mastercard, acquirers and processors operate on is decades-old with batch processing, settlement cycles, chargeback mechanisms, and regulatory frameworks built around centralised intermediaries. Bitcoin, particularly over the Lightning Network, is instant, borderless, global by nature, and peer-to-peer with settlement finality.

Bringing those together into a single merchant experience means building an orchestration layer that understands both worlds and can route, settle, and report seamlessly regardless of the payment method. We had to rebuild the payment process from the ground up. You can’t just bolt Bitcoin onto a legacy stack. The operational side is equally demanding, onboarding merchants who understand cards but not Bitcoin, managing non-custodial Lightning nodes at scale, and ensuring the whole thing is as reliable as the card terminal they’re used to. That’s the hard work, and it’s why nobody else has done it properly until now.

Many payment companies treat Bitcoin as just another payment method, but you’ve described it as a fundamentally different system. How does that perspective influence the way Musqet designs its products and long-term strategy? (Medium)

This distinction is everything. If you see Bitcoin as just another payment rail, you’ll build a processor. If you understand it as a fundamentally different monetary system, you build infrastructure that lets businesses participate in that system. That perspective shapes every product decision at Musqet. It’s why we give merchants their own non-custodial Lightning nodes rather than pursuing a custodial model. It’s why we’re building micro-treasury capabilities so merchants can hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet.

It’s why we’re launching Bitcoin payroll. We’re not just offering another way to pay, we’re building the endpoints and destinations that support Bitcoin’s transition into a truly global medium of exchange. The analogy I often use is the Trans-Atlantic telegraph cable, it took messaging times down from two weeks to two minutes once completed and operational – the shift of information flows and the future of global commerce was born in that moment. Bitcoin and the Lightning Network is bringing the same level of disruption to the era of AI, autonomous peer-to-peer agentic commerce and the internet of value. Musqet’s role is to make sure businesses of all shapes and sizes are ready for that shift.

Merchant adoption is often the bottleneck for new payment technologies. What specific incentives or advantages are you seeing that convince businesses to accept Bitcoin alongside traditional card payments?

There are three things that move the needle. First, cost. We always seek to deliver cost savings to merchants on a total cost of ownership basis and our card rates are always as aggressively competitive as we can make them. Typically, when we walk into a pub or restaurant and show them the savings on their existing card volumes alone, that gets their attention before we even mention Bitcoin. Second, the Bitcoin customer base is a ready market. Bitcoin users actively seek out merchants who accept it.

Merlin Griffiths (somewhat of a UK TV personality) is our brand ambassador and often appears on Channel 4’s First Dates and Saturday Kitchen. He chose Musqet for his pub precisely because of the innovation and competitive rates, plus he can now accept Bitcoin for beer! Third, and this is the longer play: merchants who hold some of their Bitcoin receipts are building a micro-treasury, a savings mechanism that has historically outperformed every traditional reserve asset and they can use that for staff costs, business expansion, supplier invoice payments or simply a stronger, healthier long term balance sheet.. That’s not just a payment upgrade, it’s a strategic financial advantage.

Musqet offers integrated acquiring, ePOS, and payment gateway solutions. How important is vertical integration in payments infrastructure, and does it give you an edge over more fragmented competitors?

Vertical integration is absolutely critical. If you’re a merchant trying to run a business and reconcile together a card acquirer, a separate gateway, a third-party ePOS system, and then trying to layer Bitcoin on top, you’ve already lost. The merchant experience is fragmented, the data doesn’t flow, and the cost structure is inefficient. Musqet operates across the full stack: acquiring, payment orchestration, ePOS, online gateway, and Bitcoin infrastructure – all unified. That means a single dashboard, single reconciliation, single relationship. It also means we can innovate faster. When we decided to build Bitcoin payroll capabilities, we didn’t need to negotiate with three vendors – we built it into the platform ourselves. That speed and coherence gives us a material edge over competitors who are assembling their offering from fragmented parts.

You’ve worked on regulated payment environments, including PSD2 frameworks and cross-border financial systems. How do you approach compliance when building infrastructure that includes decentralized assets like Bitcoin?

At Musqet, we operate as an Independent Sales Organisation in partnership with Shift4 and Rapyd, which are authorised as an Electronic Money Institutions by the FCA and licensed by Visa and Mastercard. On the Bitcoin side, we’re closely engaged with the evolving UK crypto regime. The FCA’s authorisation gateway opens in September 2026, and the full FSMA-based framework is expected by October 2027.

We welcome that, clear regulation builds confidence. Our approach has always been to work within the regulatory perimeter rather than around it. The non-custodial architecture we’ve built where merchants hold their own keys, is itself a compliance advantage: we’re not holding customer funds, which simplifies the regulatory picture considerably. What we advocate for is proportionate regulation that distinguishes payment infrastructure from exchanges and trading platforms.

One of Musqet’s key propositions is instant settlement in fiat or Bitcoin. How do you see instant settlement reshaping cash flow, treasury management, and risk for merchants?

This is genuinely transformational for merchants, particularly in hospitality and retail where cash flow is everything. In the traditional card world, settlement typically takes one to three business days and sometimes longer. That means a restaurant doing strong Friday and Saturday trade doesn’t see that cash until midweek. With Bitcoin over Lightning, settlement is instant and final – no chargebacks, no holds, no intermediary sitting on your money.

For treasury management, this changes the equation entirely. Merchants can deploy capital faster, manage supplier payments more confidently, and reduce their reliance on short-term credit facilities that exist purely because of settlement delays. The risk profile improves too, chargebacks are a massive hidden cost for merchants, and Bitcoin eliminates them completely. As I wrote in CoinDesk, the traditional corporate playbook of holding depreciating cash reserves is a slow bleed. Instant settlement in Bitcoin gives merchants a fundamentally better tool for managing both their working capital and their long-term savings.

There is growing discussion around stablecoins, Lightning Network payments, and even Bitcoin payroll. Which of these innovations do you believe will reach mainstream adoption first, and why?

Lightning is live, it’s fast, it’s very low cost, and the wallet ecosystem is maturing rapidly. Musqet is processing Lightning transactions today on real terminals in real businesses. That said, Stablecoins are certainly having their moment. The problem is, they are, and always will be linked to the value of the fiat currency they’re pegged to. Attempts to create synthetic or algorithmic stablecoins typically result in de-pegging and a collapse of the so-called “asset”. If you are trying to reduce the cost and transaction finality of fund transfer across time and space with low to zero volatility in FX then stablecoins are a good option. But they’re still exposed to inflation risks when held on a balance sheet for any prolonged period of time, so if you trust your government and central bank not to implement catastrophic fiscal policy measures and currency debasement then you’re likely ok to use stablecoins, but ultimately, they will face the same fate as the fiat currencies they’re backed by and trend to zero. They’re useful as a bridge for merchants who want fiat-equivalent settlement, but they’re not the end state.

Bitcoin payroll is the most radical of the three innovations you mention because it touches employment law, tax, and cultural expectations around compensation. It will take longer to become the norm to be paid in Bitcoin, but I believe it’s inevitable, simply because governments and central banks simply cannot resist the temptation to debase their currencies and ultimately, those who choose to be paid in or save in Bitcoin will fare better over the long run. We’re launching our Bitcoin Incentive and Compensation Scheme in 2026 because the demand is real and the more people that have Bitcoin in their wallets, the faster we can accelerate the usage of Bitcoin as both a long term store of value and a medium of exchange. Forward-thinking businesses want to offer this, and their employees want to receive it. But mainstream? Stablecoins now, Bitcoin Lightning next.

You’ve spoken about Bitcoin as a potential hedge against inflation and systemic inefficiencies in traditional finance. From your perspective, how close are we to seeing Bitcoin function as a true medium of exchange at scale?

We’re closer than most people think. The infrastructure layer is being built right now – that’s what Musqet does. The wallets are getting better every quarter. The Lightning Network is maturing from an experiment into enterprise-grade payment infrastructure. CNBC anchors and Economists are debating whether Bitcoin can be a medium of exchange with US Army Generals also stating in the US Senate that Bitcoin is “valuable as a tool of power projection” that’s a very different conversation from five years ago when there was televised debates questioning whether Bitcoin would even survive at all – it always would do, people’s understanding is just starting to catch up to the inevitable.

The inflation hedge argument is well established, I’ve written extensively about how corporate balance sheets are bleeding value through monetary debasement. But the transition from store of value to medium of exchange requires destinations, places where people can actually spend Bitcoin on everyday goods and services. That’s precisely what Musqet builds. I compare it to the early internet: the technology existed, but it needed endpoints, websites, browsers, communities to become useful. We’re building those endpoints for Bitcoin. I’d say we’re three to five years from it being genuinely normalised at the point of sale and that’s why we exist and what we continue to drive forward.

Looking ahead, what does success look like for Musqet over the next five years, and how do you see the global payments landscape evolving if borderless, Bitcoin-enabled infrastructure becomes widely adopted?

Success for Musqet in five years is processing billions in transactions across the UK, Europe and North America, with Bitcoin representing a meaningful and growing share of every merchant’s payment mix. Beyond the numbers, success means that accepting Bitcoin is as unremarkable as accepting contactless, it just works, no explanation needed, no friction. If borderless, Bitcoin-enabled infrastructure becomes widely adopted, the global payments landscape changes profoundly. Settlement times collapse. Cross-border transaction costs plummet.

Merchants in Lagos, London, and Lima operate on the same payment rails for the first time in history. The intermediary cost structures that extract billions from the global economy get compressed or eliminated. That’s the world we’re building towards. Bitcoin is as enormous an innovation as double-entry bookkeeping in fifteenth-century Italy, which gave rise to credit, investment risk, and global merchant trading. Musqet’s job is to make sure every business can participate in what comes next.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Musqet.