This excites me so much!
I was reading this article and could not stop thinking about the ecosystem being built on Ethereum. Especially, Lending, Borrowing, Sending, Paying, and Stable currencies native to Eth such as the DAI.
When you read this, you get the strong sensation that Ethereum will be the chain which will allow on-boarding of every young person who holds a smartphone into a true global economy built on the internet.
In a way, Stripe is blockbuster, but the real revolution is Netfilx - native to the internet. Enter Ethereum.
Link:
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/stripe-payments-apple-amazon-facebook
Here are some snippets I thought are must-read:
“Sure, we have solved all kinds of scaling issues, deployments, technology — but the core problems of helping people work together were thought about more back then. Their concept of technology was about empowering humans.”
Stripe entered the credit-card business – helping their business customers issue cards to employees using existing Mastercard and Visa rails
70 per cent of internet commerce is going to come from emerging markets
no-one wanted to invest in Middle Eastern companies, “because the instability meant they doubted our legal system – to protect their money, they need to have a strong legal system
“Before we could accept dollars, we were only taking payments in Egyptian pounds,” she explains. “If you live in London and you really like a dress, you Google EGP to figure out what currency that is. You see Egypt. Everything you see on TV says that Egypt’s unstable. You don’t know if that means that you’re actually going to receive your dress and suddenly you’re not interested. Atlas saved our business.”
"my brands in New York needed paying in dollars. No one wanted to dabble in foreign currency, so we had to withdraw the EGP from the bank, go to the currency exchange on the black market, redeposit the dollars and lose a lot of money every time.”
"Then, in 2016, the government devalued the Egyptian pound to secure a $12 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, prompting soaring inflation and rising borrowing costs"
"before she knew it, she was effectively running a global business"
"A majority of the growth over the next ten years will come from underserved markets,” he explained. “That includes about 6.2 billion people we don’t reach yet, and that’s a huge missed opportunity.”
At its core was the ambition to “increase the GDP of the internet”
"A lot of these entrepreneurs would love to launch a global internet business. They find it difficult to trade on the world market – but these are literally millions of nascent businesses. We were just trying to work out how we can help them do that simply"
“It’s not the cheapest provider but it does remove all other intermediaries so it’s the only fee you’ll pay”
"80 per cent of US users have bought something from a Stripe-powered business, although very few of them knew they were using it"
"Stripe operates like a white-label merchant account, processing payments, checking for fraud and taking a small percentage"
"Setting up accounting platforms to manage these incoming and outgoing payments would have taken six months to build. Stripe processed payments through its own servers, allowing payers and vendors to connect with minimum fuss"
"WhatsApp anyone around the world and it’s free. It’s a remarkable act of coordination between the telcos and ISPs and the people who own the fiber underneath the sea to create this global communications network. Then, if you look at the economic infrastructure, we haven’t even started"
"The company offered seven lines of code and a promise that no other changes were needed"
"Developers had to choose between this and complex legacy systems built by banks"
"Paypal – designed to simplify payments – actually made this worse. The company infuriated startups with its restrictions – once turnover hit a certain level, Paypal automatically put the business on a 21 to 60 day rolling reserve, meaning that up to 30 per cent of a company’s revenue could be locked up for up to two months"
"companies wanting to set up shop had to go to a bank, which processes payments, and setup a gateway to connect the two. This takes weeks, lots of people, and fee after fee. Much of the software in place was decades old and written by banks, credit-card companies and financial middlemen"
"The problem has always been the layers of intermediation"
"The fintech ‘revolution’ that followed, however, wasn’t much of an uprising but more of a spot of portfolio diversifying by some banks that laid down the payment rails any eager startup had to ride on. The banks still verified identity and owned the account for cards and payments drew from"
"The hardest part was finding a way to accept customers’ money. You could share a photograph on Facebook but you couldn’t move money around in the same way"
the reason 402 is reserved for future use – was that this code would be used to transact digital cash or micropayments. It has never been implemented
it’s obvious that support for payments should be a first-class concept on the web and it’s obvious that there should be a lot of direct commerce taking place on the web