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An embeddable and customizable fiat-to-crypto onramp
- raiyu 4y agoThis is great, one of the annoying bits of doing anything in Crypto has been buying Crypto in the first place, this certainly makes the whole process easier. And since Stripe is handling the KYC portion it reduces the complexity tremendously on anyone building and Stripe is a trusted party so great on all accounts. Now ... if there was just a killer app that was actually useful ;)
- pjkundert 4y agoPayment for: - software your government doesn’t want you to have - services your government is rationing - goods your government doesn’t feel you qualify for - remittances your government doesn’t feel your relatives are entitled to
- k__ 4y agoI used moonpay to onramp, which was surprisingly simple.
- jjtheblunt 4y agoWhat would someone use this for, when fiat works everywhere?
- TheJoeMan 4y agoI think it would be neat if I could pay 1 penny to read a single HN-linked NYT or WSJ article. But the entrenched payment processors refuse to give up their 5%+25cent cut or whatever.
- gamblor956 4y agoIt's even more expensive to use crypto. You would spend almost as much on gas/transaction fees as you would on a year's subscription.
- iskander 4y agoYou can check current prices here: https://l2fees.info/ https://l2fees.info/ Sending any amount of ETH it costs between $0.01 (on the Loopring network) and $0.46 on the Ethereum mainnet (with the most popular layer 2 network, Arbitrum, costing $0.02). So not quite there to send 1c micropayments, especially since sending USDC would instead cost something like 2x-3x more, but not inconceivable that it might get there on newer layer 2 networks which do more aggressive batching (using proof techniques called STARKs and SNARKs). There are some other networks, such as Solana where transactions are effectively free (though even very small fractions of a cent add up for an algorithm): https://solanabeach.io/transactions https://solanabeach.io/transactions
- gamblor956 4y agoSo the defense to crypto being expensive to transact in is to...use another network on top of the crypto instead of the crypto I actually want to use. THIS IS WHY CRYPTO DID NOT TAKE OFF. It's too complicated and expensive to use for all of the supposed use case; it's objectively worse than comparable fiat options.
- iskander 4y agoI send USDC on eth pretty frequently and for larger amounts find it more convenient than Venmo or Zelle. For smaller amounts it would only make sense if other people are already using L2s, which might happen through website integrations (or not).
- llanowarelves 4y agoI agree with you that it should be solved at the protocol-level, as the BTC whitepaper describes, "for coffee" etc. There are plenty of cryptos with focus on scaling and cheap on-chain transactions, like E-cash.
- acdha 4y agoDon't forget to include the conversion fees. In the example shown in the blog post, it looks like using ETH to pay that $10 bill costs $1.63 vs. the $0.59 it would cost to use a credit card for the same transaction.
- denimnerd42 4y agothat would be great
- trh0awayman 4y agoXanadu is starting to sound more and more attractive these days
- wmf 4y agoXanadu was never real. The micropayment part was never even designed AFAIK let alone implemented.
- tootie 4y agoThe fees are closer to 3% or a bit under these days. And that's for a very robust and mature infrastructure, not just on the merchant side, but the buyer side. Credit cards do a lot more than just send payments, you get all the benefits of things like dispute resolution, rewards points and the bug/feature of spending money you don't have in hand. If you go to a fully-baked crypto payment provider like Coinbase, they still charge 1% for a far less sophisticated product. The cost of all the things that crypto doesn't do get shifted to consumers and merchants indirectly.
- imtringued 4y agoThe mental effort to click a button to pay a penny is too high.
- rvz 4y ago> when fiat works everywhere? And in countries like Argentina, it doesn't work for them. Hence why this [0] and this [1] exists. [0] https://www.usebraintrust.com https://www.usebraintrust.com [1] https://stellar.org/moneygram https://stellar.org/moneygram
- zubiaur 4y agoI suspect you are being down-voted because most people are not familiar with currency controls, hyperinflation and price controls. The Argentinian peso is not worth the paper it's printed on.
- repomies69 4y agoI guess that people in US and other big countries with strong currencies don't really understand that there are smaller fiat currencies and these are actually used. I wonder how often you have to convert your USD even when traveling, last time I was visiting Africa I remember most just accepted USD or euros directly even though the countries had their own local currencies.
- irusensei 4y agoI'm tired of pointing this and getting downvoted into oblivion. Most negative comments come from privileged people living in Western Europe or the western US. You can even guess which is which from the timestamp. In the end it is a soft family-friendly version of "stop being poor".
- Aunche 4y agoGP's comment is about Stripe's service, not cryptocurrency in general. Unless if Stripe really wants to set their money on fire, I doubt that they're going onramping any hyperinflating currency. If you're in a country with a weak currency, what you really want isn't crypto but rather a stable fiat, mainly the USD. Cryptocurrency only really helps the relatively privileged people in these countries to bypass currency controls.
- jjtheblunt 4y agooh, I understand but had not known of that case until you mentioned it. thank you
- treis 4y agoSpeaking from personal experience: "to buy drugs"
- repomies69 4y agocan you share more details pls
- googlryas 4y agoMy FedEx driver is a drug dealer and he don't even know it.
- treis 4y ago(1) Install tor (2) Search reddit/internet for marketplace on tor (3) Be very sure that you have actually reached the marketplace. Lots of scammers MITM them and steal your crypto by changing the pay to wallet (4) Buy crypto (which kind depends on merchant & market place) (5) Place order on marketplace (6) Send crypto to the address they give you (7) Encrypt your shipping info with the merchants public key and send it to them (8) Drugs show up 1-2 weeks later
- m00dy 4y agoThe instructions above can get you pretty far. But before trying this, make sure that the crypto you are using supports zero-knowledge proof or zk-proof. This way, you make it harder for law enforcements to link all these things to your identity.
- r3trohack3r 4y agoI hear this a lot. And I know it’s true. But it seems like a bad use of crypto. I prefer to do crime in cash. Cash doesn’t have a permanent public ledger associated with it. Even if that ledger is “zero-knowledge” - I’m betting my freedom on bullet proof math staying bullet proof for the statute of limitations. I understand that “at scale” cash may be a higher risk than crypto. But I’m not “at scale.” Local, last-mile, cash transactions are preferable in nearly every way.
- cle 4y agoThere are four "partners" mentioned in TFA, and it links to a list of many more.
- idiotsecant 4y ago>What would someone use this for, when fiat works everywhere? For the same reason some people line to use linux when windows works everywhere. Actual technical use cases, ideology, and 'tinker-friendliness' 1) there are some use cases where it is better (typically when you want to do something that the state doesn't want you to do) 2) there are ideological reasons to prefer decentralized ownership of the financial system rather than assuming the state can be responsible with the dials and levers of that system 3) There are neat properties of crypto that are fun for tinkerers - money is programmable and you can do neat tinker-toy things with it like micropayments, fintech like collateralize loans and decentralized derivatives trading, dumb things and experiments like the old peepeth, etc. I think eventually if adoption is wide enough there will be society-altering implications inherent to crypto but for now I think it's those 3 things.
- dist1ll 4y agoFinally someone brings up tinkering - a.k.a. the thing that hacking (and by extension HN) is supposed to be about.
- rahen 4y agoCore developers of the Bitcoin ecosystem are also Linux hackers. Rusty Russel, C-lightning main developer was also the creator of iptables and a good part of the Linux TCP stack. Technical minded people showing hostility toward Bitcoin because of some obvious scammers is as unfathomable to me as showing hostility toward TCP/IP because of malwares.
- kreetx 4y agoDon't forget Hal Finney :)
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y agoTCP/IP works quite beautifully for something designed decades ago, and actually solves real problems, though (like delivering your message to my t̶e̶l̶e̶t̶y̶p̶e halfway across the globe). "Crypto" seems to be quite good at worsening air pollution in my country (which is already very bad) and not much else.
- yieldcrv 4y agoThere are examples on that page The simple answer is because there is existing demand, not because any of that demand matches any of your use cases
- irusensei 4y agoIt doesn't. You just think it does because you live (or even better, were born) in a privileged area of the planet.
- seydor 4y agoStripe isnt used much outside those areas
- malthaus 4y agoGiven that the house of cards finally comes crashing down, a crypto-to-fiat offramp to get your money into safety would actually be more helpful. "Overall, we maintain fundamental optimism about how crypto can help to facilitate a more globally accessible financial services ecosystem." Sure; either that or the tasty 5% fee from the example flow?
- impulser_ 4y agoMost exchange already provide crypto-to-fiat offramp. For example you can send cash from your Coinbase account to PayPal instantly with no charge. You can also do your bank, but obviously that will take a few days.
- bewaretheirs 4y agoI only follow this topic casually but the impression I get is that the existing cryptocurrency offramps are not dependable -- they're either nonfunctional under heavy load or intentionally shut down at the drop of a hat; there isn't an entity like the FDIC to step in to gracefully shut down failing institutions, and let customers get their money out ASAP. What would be once-per-decade anomalous events with real money seem like an everyday failure with cryptocurrency exchanges.
- wmf 4y agoEverything you've said is true, and yet the probability that an exchange will fail during the hour it takes you to cash out is very small.
- p0pcult 4y agoYou should look into Coinbase, which seems to be the exception.
- bewaretheirs 4y agoI have no reason to do so, and have better things to do with my time. I decided early on to stay away from cryptocurrencies; everything in the space I've seen ever since has reinforced that decision. Please respect this.
- reidjs 4y agoUnclear if this is in production or if they are just seeing if it’s viable to build, but it would be awesome if this works! I signed up for the release.
- edwinwee 4y agoIt's live! If you're in the US, you can try it out on the blog post: https://stripe.com/blog/crypto-onramp https://stripe.com/blog/crypto-onramp. A bunch of beta users went live already too—you can see them here: https://twitter.com/gponcin/status/1598363240634888193 https://twitter.com/gponcin/status/1598363240634888193.
- milofeynman 4y agoIt kind of seems like this product will be dead on arrival. Why did y'all go through with a launch instead of making the tough, but probably correct, decision to just kill it?
- rahen 4y agoIt's KYC. Thanks but no thanks, I'll keep using DEXes...
- acdha 4y agoKYC is a legal requirement. If you want cryptocurrency to be adopted, it needs to be legal to use. Even if it becomes cost competitive, most businesses aren't going to touch something which exposes them to risk of getting involved in a money laundering case.
- ajconway 4y agoWhat about ZCash-like networks with anonymous transactions?
- rahen 4y agoThat's a privacy coin. It mostly attracts agorists, not businesses.
- rahen 4y agoWith fiat money, you can legally retrieve anonymous cash from an ATM if you choose so, without suspicion. Or likewise, you can reveal your identity for a transaction when appropriate. This should be the same with crypto. Let's see it this way: surveillance is needed and those who seek privacy may indeed conceal illegal activities. But I think we can agree not everyone is a criminal and if I have a right to privacy with cash, I should have the same right with cryptocurrencies.
- katabora 4y agoImpeccable timing
- phlipski 4y agoAn embeddable and customizable fiat-to-ponzi onramp. Fixed the title!
- paxys 4y agoUsers seamlessly buy crypto with USD and spend it. Merchants seamlessly convert crypto back to USD and cash it out. So what is the point of crypto again other than giving Stripe (and similar centralized providers) a needless cut?
- m00dy 4y agousd for cross border payments is a problem and speaking frankly it is a hugeeeee problem. Crypto fixes this.
- newaccount74 4y agoIsn't something like wise.com a much better option for that? You have to trust only a single company instead of multiple potentially sketchy exchanges, and you are not exposed to crypto currency fluctuations.
- m00dy 4y agook, usd is terrible for cross border micropayments
- valcron1000 4y agoAs someone who uses Wise out of necesity: no, it's not better. Wise can freeze my account whenever they want. They can go out of business any day. Fees can change over time. Transfers can take a long time (ex. wire transfers can take several working days). Crypto is a far better solution in my experience.
- newaccount74 4y agoAll those problems also apply to the exchanges you use for crypto. Unless you are thinking about a hypothetical future where you can directly use cryptocurrencies to pay your rent and buy your groceries.
- 4y ago
- brainchild-adam 4y agoI am both fascinated and confused by crypto currencies. The idea of a free-as-in-freedom, flexible, secure, and more democratic and independent payment system seems quite attractive. At the same time I seem to see mainly examples of high-to-extreme volatility, fraud, technical and regulatory exclusion and suppression, and a total lack of real-world practicality. I am quite sure my view is skewed. If you have used crypto currencies in real life, ideally for more than speculative investment, would you be willing to share (parts of) the experience? I'd be very curious to learn more about this part of the puzzle of crypto. How did you acquire crypto? What did you use it for? How did you feel about the transaction? Would you do it again? Or anything else you'd like to share for that matter.
- agentultra 4y agoThese ideas are all technological in nature and avoid thinking about what payment systems are: they're social constructs, not technological ones. The problem with crypto-as-payment network is that their central appeal is that they bypass all of the regulatory frameworks that protect every day people from money laundering and fraud; bypass sanctions, etc. As soon as they're subjected to the same regulation and oversight that other payment networks and money transmitters are... there's no point. As a network technology it's slow, inefficient, difficult to develop on and extend. And any organization set up to follow regulations that exist today would have to have reserves, charters, submit themselves to regular inspections, etc and... be exactly what we already have. Some people think by-passing international wire rails (SWIFT etc) is the big win: I can send money to friends/family in the global south without the fees/sanctions associated with such transfers in the regulated system. I would like to see that become a better experience for people in general but I don't think crypto and bypassing the state is the answer here. It's way more risky for a lot of reasons.
- systems_glitch 4y agoI had one customer ever want to pay for some hobbyist electronics kit using BTC. He worked for...a startup doing cryptocurrency processing :P Transaction went fine, I cashed out through Coinbase, didn't sit on it too long. It was not inconvenient. This was before BTC hashing efforts were consuming nation-state levels of electricity. I'd probably decline nowadays based on that alone.
- voz_ 4y agoMight as well add fiat-to-pork-belly-futures, when there's no real world use for crypto, its just a tradable commodity without the real world application of commodity goods.
- Animats 4y agoThis might have been a viable product in 2019. Today. no. Usually, you can't buy money with a credit card. That's a personal loan, and has higher rates. None of the major US banks allow buying crypto with a credit card.[1] Debit cards, yes. [1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/credit-cards/buy-crypto-with-credit-card/ https://www.forbes.com/advisor/credit-cards/buy-crypto-with-...
- contingencies 4y agoAfter completing detailed research in to crypto-addressable opportunities within global finance I built a POC for this in parallel to the exchange POC at Kraken in 2011. It was canned for legal reasons, and a decision made to focus on exchange. Coinbase started the following year, with deeper investor pockets and a generally more aggressive "beg for forgiveness" legal strategy. The rest is history.
- Tao3300 4y ago
- rkho 4y agoThis is beyond exhausting to see on HN on every single thread related to cryptocurrency and unfortunately your comment is the straw the broke the camel's back. The heart of HN is a community which celebrates technical curiosity and exploration. Honestly, cut your shit out. I've grown completely tired of this kind of attitude, it goes against literally everything that drove us towards technical fields to begin with. To see this kind of dismissive, hostile, and vitriolic behavior towards any technical space is not what we as a community should ever have to come to accept or tolerate.
- Tao3300 4y ago> your comment is the straw the broke the camel's back Have another. The entire crypto "space" is bullshit. Cut it out. > To see this kind of dismissive, hostile, and vitriolic behavior towards any technical space It has repeatedly shown that it is doing no good for anyone. I liken it to homeopathy and MLMs. Such is my contempt and dissatisfaction. Such is the ill that they bring to many to fill the pockets of few. Would you like to see curiousity and celebration of those fields? Open-mindedness is one thing, but don't be so open-minded that your brain falls out. PSA: Remember to cut this crypto shit out already!
- rkho 4y agoGet off your high horse. This is disgusting rhetoric unfit for HN.
- Tao3300 4y agoYou don't get to claim someone else is on a high horse while simultaneously playing rhetoric police. Not to mention, metadiscussion is always off-topic. The topic being crypto, which is bullshit that needs to be stopped.
- seydor 4y agoThe only such onramp i could trust would be localbitcoins or sth. Anything that involves online seems to be hacked and is spied by 100 different agencies. A bit too much when all you want to buy is vitamins.
- jongjong 4y agoThis is great news. It's great that Stripe is willing to support decentralization, especially in the current environment. Fiat-to-crypto on-boarding has been a major pain point due to regulations. It has deprived an entire generation of opportunities to launch crypto-based businesses outside of the corporate and private equity sphere.
- jongjong 4y agoSeems I got downvoted... I guess Stripe giving the next generation access to opportunities is a bad thing?
- wmf 4y agoIf Stripe can build a compliant on-ramp, you could have built the same thing years ago. Why didn't you?
- jongjong 4y ago1. Complying with regulations and dealing with banks costs too much money. All I have to invest is my time and skills as a developer. 2. Even if I built such product myself and paid all necessary costs, it wouldn't get any traffic. nobody would use it. These days, if you're a no-name company/developer without any special social connections, it will cost you a fortune to get a good rank on a search engine... The ranking algorithms are completely opaque. Social media influencers never respond to my messages, even if I offer to pay them money. Nobody ever answers any emails or messages these days. It's like talking to a wall.
- imtringued 4y agoI can't because of expensive regulations that mandate that you have multiple people educated in the old system. You need a banking license even if you don't want to do traditional banking with its traditional risks at all. You will hire people who know how to do traditional banking but not your innovative banking. I don't even mean cryptocurrencies specifically. There are plenty of different ways to implement money systems but the law only knows a specific one and it is the type that makes a lot of people unhappy and therefore it needs an ever growing list of regulations and interventions.
- ilaksh 4y agoThe onboarding is only for Ethereum or Ethereum-based stablecoins?
- skybrian 4y agoIt would be interesting to know how Stripe sets exchange rates. They act as an exchange for many traditional currencies and now for cryptocurrencies, in both directions. To some extent they should be able to do this internally, when cash flows balance out.
- csomar 4y agoThis is crap. Countries not supported? KYC? Registration? How is this supporting decentralization? This seems like an overly complex payment flow just to get us to where we started from. This is just Stripe trying to get on the NFT bandwagon (too late by the way). They'll probably close this service in 2 years.
- sli 4y agoLooking forward to this quietly being discontinued in a couple months when Stripe realizes a lot of the activity is just hype and not actual people.
- TeMPOraL 4y agoSpeaking of ramps, what about crypto-to-fiat offramp? My brief experience with crypto involved the couple hundred bucks in Stellar/Lumen/whatever-its-called that the peddlers of that crypto coin gave for free to established Keybase users a while ago. I spent many hours trying to figure out how to convert them into real money without giving my government ID to some sketchy crypto companies, to no avail. Yes, I know, KYC. But still, what struck me as interesting is, there is tons of first and third-party guides and articles on everything you can do with those Stellar/Lumen coins, except the one thing that I'd think most unwilling recipients are interested in: how to cash it out and forget about it. It's like this part of the crypto space (and I suspect most of the entire ecosystem, really) is heavily biased towards ingesting money. It feels like videogame virtual money you can buy, but not sell.
- roenxi 4y agoIf you expect to be able to buy fiat currencies without going through KYC protocols you're not going to get much satisfaction. Something I've observed about the US is it is often a financial island with the rest of the world refusing to take US clients because of the burden of KYC. Those laws aren't some sort of minor afterthought.
- Thlom 4y agoI somehow converted the lumens to bitcoin and sent the bitcoin to my wallet in a local exchange and deposited it from there. I kind of trust that exchange as they have "serious" people on the owner side.
- Tao3300 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Gordonjcp 4y agoHow exactly are cryptocurrencies not fiat? They're not backed by anything.
- Thorentis 4y ago> Blockchains provide developers with extraordinarily powerful capabilities... Does anybody take statements like this seriously any more? I realise if you're spruiking a crypto product you need to have at least drunk some of the koolaid, but are we still pretending that blockchains are actually useful constructs?
- garethrowlands 4y agoThis is a bit like asking if anyone still takes Donald Trump seriously any more. Clearly, people do. Not the majority of people but still some people.
- Mistletoe 4y agoYou are making a foolish ignorant statement that he himself has made about cryptocurrency. Very few technologies are all good or all bad as you desire to paint this one to be. The world exists in the gray area in between. It’s a tool that has the potential for good and evil, like cash, or nuclear power, or encryption, or the internet. Anyway, this is a digression and something I find infuriating about cryptocurrency stories on HN. Scroll down and people pop in and want to relitigate whether cryptocurrency should even exist like they are the first person that ever had this idea on HN. This is a story about how Stripe is implementing fiat to crypto on-ramps. It’s not a story about “should cryptocurrency exist?” or “is cryptocurrency a scam?” But that’s all this conversation will devolve into.