commerce

Base

Two thoughts:

1) These videos are getting better -- @jessepollak street interview game getting stronger (we see you G). It's fun watching "normal" people react to offers of crypto 😆

2) Real talk, I don't understand why crypto is better for IRL small businesses than existing payment rails. Is it mainly the fee structure? 

I've understood financial bundling (https://haseebq.com/crypto-is-financial-unbundling/) to be beneficial for businesses because it reduces risk -- though it can also hurt them via chargebacks

Genuine question and curious to learn from folks who know more about the payments space

credit card processing fees for merchants are ~2.9% + a fixed fee, usually $0.30 or less. debit is much more reasonable with no % fee and only a fixed fee, which is why some merchants are debit/cash only

so even if onchain payments on a cheap L2 like /base aren’t “free” since the merchant needs to off-ramp USDC with a spread of 0.5-1%, this is still a huge improvement for their payment processing

put simply: crypto is a meaningful improvement for merchants vs. legacy systems

figuring out my next thing | marketing, content, growth | prev. Juicebox, Nouns, RAW DAO | casting about coffee, hi-fi, and other rabbit holes

I also think there’s a bear case along the lines of “hey but customers need to on-ramp USD to USDC as well, that’s another 0.5-1% spread”

fair, but bank accounts and credit cards aren’t free either. pretty much any decent credit card is $1-200/year or more, same for chequing accounts.

and even then we’re still at 2% spread start-to-finish, including customer and merchant, which is far below ~2.9% + $0.30 for the merchant alone.

the bigger question is what middleman will emerge as the “stripe of crypto” to make crypto point-of-sale accessible and what take rate will they introduce which may alter these calculations.

stripe itself is very likely to be the stripe of crypto