David Parkinson

David Parkinson is the founder of Musqet, a UK fintech building payment infrastructure that combines card networks with Bitcoin and Lightning payments in a single merchant device. A former consulting and transformation executive, he works to accelerate everyday Bitcoin adoption by merchants.

Musqet puts card networks and Bitcoin through one terminal, so a shop can take Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Apple Pay and Google Pay alongside bitcoin and Lightning, with point of sale, stock, staff and accounting in the same system. The design choice is deliberate: merchants do not adopt a new payment rail on principle, they add one when it costs them nothing and sits inside the till they already use. Its chairman came from the Bank of England’s Faster Payments scheme, an unusual pedigree for a Bitcoin company and a deliberate one.

Parkinson came to this from consulting and business transformation rather than from crypto, and argues that adoption stalls at the checkout rather than at the wallet. He speaks on merchant adoption at Bitcoin events in Britain and Europe, and the company has focused on hospitality and food businesses, the sector where card fees bite hardest on thin margins.