Companies shouldn’t worry about the safety and volatility of digital currencies like Bitcoin and instead should focus on the business they might miss out on if they don’t embrace it, Weve's outgoing CEO David Sear has said.

Speaking at The Drum Live, in a session that saw The Drum receive its first subscription payment in Bitcoin, Sear warned that despite the concerns over the risk trading in digital currency throws up, not doing so would prove a bigger problem in the future.

“The risk to you if you don’t embrace digital currencies as they emerge is the risk of not doing business with a slab of world… You’ll see that the people buying this currency is coming out of a relatively closed slab of economies and particularly in China.”

The Chinese central bank recently declared that Bitcoin wasn’t a legal currency, something which Sear said was actually just a “guise of prohibition” to allow the country to deal in it under its own laws around currency in the market.

“The Chinese actually effectively sanctioned the purchase of Bitcoins by the general population and liberalised it in a very interesting way for their own e-commerce and m-commerce access to the rest of the world. [China] with the biggest population in the world, the largest economy in the world, and the most closed in the world is about to open, and one of the ways it does it is through this digital currency. So if you want to sell to China in the next 20 years you better get on board with some kind of digital currency because it’ s going to be the way it happens.”

Sear eschewed fears around the volatility of Bitcoin, which can fluctuate wildly, and said that it is a “normal state of affairs” for any currency.

Eitan Jankelewitz, an intellectual property lawyers at Sheridans, whose company accepts Bitcoin as payment, said that the currency should begin to stabilise as usage of it becomes more widespread.

"It’s unbelievably early, the code has only been out five years… It’s still technically in beta. The infrastructure is just getting into place, stable exchanges are established and the volatility should decrease when the market matures and you have more distribution of the currency.

“It’s important to bear in mind that it isn’t the finished article. It may not be the case it’s the currency that takes off – there could be another currency built on similar lines, which has a different feature set, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t ground-breaking.”

Also speaking on the panel was Wouter Vonk, European marketing manager at BitPay, a Bitcoin service provider, who set up The Drum to accept the currency and Joel Raziel, director of Future Coins, who owns and operates Bitcoin ATMs.

Earlier today online payments company Skrill revealed it has appointed Sear chief commercial officer - a role he will take up next month.