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Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
How to bootstrap crypto as a consumer-friendly payment method When I joined Coinbase in 2014, my first job was trying to get merchants to accept Bitcoin payments. (I worked with @nick on this.) Bitcoin as a consumer payment method didn't work out for a few reasons: 1. Clunky UX — after scanning a QR code, you had to send the exact amount of Bitcoin from your wallet; prices could also fluctuate during the checkout flow 2. Small user base — population of people with a bitcoin wallet was probably closer to 10M in 2014. 3. Lack of incentives — no incentive for consumers to overcome the clunky UX. Further, credit and even some debit cards offered cash back and points. *** Fast forward 10 years, consumer adoption of crypto payments is still low. However, we have the possibility of significantly improved UX thanks to faster, cheaper and smarter blockchains, stablecoins, and at least 100M consumers with a fiat-connected crypto account. What remains is the lack of incentives. 1/
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Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
2/ One strategy for improving incentives is to adopt "your margin is my opportunity". Accepting card payments is costly for businesses, esp. smaller ones. ~3% per transaction and then some % of transactions are fraudulent. So call it 4-5% all in. Additionally, consumers get 1% back on those purchases. So one strategy would be to split the savings: - 1.0% cost for merchants - 1.0% cash back to consumers - 0.0% processing fee for crypto processor Further, focus on small businesses (since larger businesses negotiate much lower rates with card companies). American Express had a program called Small Business Saturdays where they would waive processing fees for qualified small businesses. Lean into similar branding that paying with crypto is pro-small business and not feeding the "big bad" duopoly of Visa / MC. What incentive for the crypto processor? You'll likely make money either with trading fees or, if you're a stablecoin issuer, the interest that you generate from increased circulation.
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🌈 YON
@yonfrula
in countries like argentina, the incentive is right there: to dodge payments in our national currency. already one third of argentinians use crypto, and we got apps like belo and lemon which make it easy to buy and sell crypto, but they're still regulated. when we get base into a mercadopago-like system, it's done.
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Joe Blau 🎩
@joeblau
BTC 10/05/2009: $0.00076 12/30/2014: $309.87 (407,732×) 06/20/2024: $65,469.80 (85,680,758×) Bitcoin didn’t work as a payment solution because it punished everyone who tried to spend it. https://bitcoin.zorinaq.com/price/
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Charles Yoo-Naut
@cnaut
Working on this
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Sean Wince 🎩
@seanwince
BitPay had the best UX for merchant BTC adoption at the time. The QR code would suggest the exact amount needed for the tx, so it was pretty easy to use ... At least until network fees exploded and nobody could agree on how to scale BTC. That's what really killed BTC as an alternate payment method
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Ese 🌳
@esss
/bcard has specific token incentives for each community @noggles for example uses bcard to reward their holders
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Puneet - Going to Farcon Asia
@0xpuneet
Crypto payments should not try to take market share from Visa or Mastercard; new markets, like being the native currency of AI agents, can be promising.
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Khalid
@xkhalid
To add, generally speaking we're far off on targets: - Remittance average cost is 6.5%, it even increased in Q4 2023. WorldBank target is 3%. - 57% of cross border payments lack transparency of cost and speed. - Cash remittance is literally faster than digital because it doesn't involve banks.
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Emily 🎩🃏🍖
@mahla
🔥🔥🔥
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