Before being nominated by President-elect Trump to lead NASA, Jared Isaacman guided his payments company Shift4 into the crypto market. Isaacman founded Shift4 in 1999 when he was 16, and built it into a $9.3 billion company, thanks in part to a bet on stablecoins. Shift4 recently launched a Pay with Crypto offering for the 200,000 merchants on its platform, making it possible to spend crypto at hotels, restaurants and stadiums.
The company's stock price has jumped almost 40% this year, lifting its market cap to $9.3 billion. Isaacman started the business in 1999 at age 16 and in a Dec. 4 post on his Truth Social platform announcing the nomination, Trump wrote,'Jared has demonstrated exceptional leadership, building a trailblazing global financial technology company.'Inside Isaacman's New York residence near Central Park, around a lofted conference room with glass walls that sits above the apartment's living area, Isaacman and members of his executive team sat with Alex Wilson and Pat Duffy, two entrepreneurs who were in the final stages of selling their crypto donation marketplace to Shift4. It was early 2022.he crypto market had hit a record a few months earlier, jumping sixfold from the end of 2019 through the close of 2021. A range of digital tokens were delivering outsized returns. The market was frothy, spirits were high and meme coins were in their prime.Stablecoins are a subset of cryptocurrencies matched to the value of a real-world asset and are virtually synonymous with U.S. dollar-pegged tokens. Today, they're collectively worth around $200 billion and are often used to move money across borders at a fraction of the cost of legacy payment systems. Wilson, 31, said the group around the table at Isaacman's house,'all agreed it was more likely that stablecoins would become a regular medium of exchange than bitcoin or ethereu