Harper Reed
@harper.eth
I have been teasing a story for a minute. Here is a 🧵 of what is going on TL;DR: After a bunch of pain and suffering we are launching our off ramp product: A simple personal offramp! You can sign up for the waitlist at skyteller.xyz. We are going to prioritize farcaster users for onboarding over the next few weeks
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Harper Reed
@harper.eth
Back in early 2022, we got really into off-ramps in the crypto world. We knew that without a good off-ramp, the ecosystem limits who can participate. If we want web3 to be what we all know it can be, participants need to be able to buy groceries, pay for childcare, and (most importantly) buy tacos!
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Harper Reed
@harper.eth
We wanted to change that!💥
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Harper Reed
@harper.eth
We set out to build a really neat solution for off-ramps that would work for everyone, but particularly people working in crypto. That solution: debit cards!
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Harper Reed
@harper.eth
This wasn’t our first debit card rodeo - our team had launched one of the first PayPal debit cards, the Venmo card (remember the dough lol), and built a lot of Venmo infra, so we were confident we could pull this off.😎
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Harper Reed
@harper.eth
We built out a really neat product, settled on some great partners, and even got bank approval, network approval and general approval pretty quickly!
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Harper Reed
@harper.eth
We thought we were making great progress, but then right before deploying our test cards in market, our partner asked us to wait until Q1 2023 “due to an audit by the card network.” This was right after FTX so I knew we were in trouble.
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Harper Reed
@harper.eth
We waited patiently, but then our partner came back with some challenges. We fixed the issues, but then our partner dropped a bombshell: they just didn't want to work with crypto companies anymore. We were pretty devastated!😔
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Harper Reed
@harper.eth
But we didn't give up. We found another bank that was excited about our progress, but then they paused all programs until they could figure out what was going on in crypto. After talking to a few more bank partners, we realized that — right now — a self-custodial debit card program is probably untenable.
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