Innopay on Hive Thrive #54 — a big thank you and a recap

Last tuesday Hive account@sorincristescu and I (Hive account@sdcme) joined hosts
Hive account@buttcoins and Hive account@alessandrawhite on Hive Thrive Community Hour for episode 54. It was our first time on the show, and honestly, one of the better conversations we've had publicly about what we're building.

Hive account@alessandrawhite wrote a great wrap-up of the episode:
@alessandrawhite/thats-a-wrap-for-hive-thrive-community-hour-feat-sdcme-and-sorincristescu-for-innopay

She captured it well, but here's the short version from my end.

The experience

What struck me about the format is how the show opened. Before any project talk, Hive account@alessandrawhite spent the first part of the episode just getting to know us: where we're from, how we got to Hive, what we do outside of work. That's the Hive Thrive ethos in practice: community before crypto, people before projects. By the time Hive account@buttcoins dug into Innopay, the room already had a sense of who we are, and the questions that followed reflected that.

What we covered

The conversation started from a simple frustration: dining out involves a lot of waiting. Waiting for the menu. Waiting to order. Waiting to get the waiter's attention. Waiting to pay. Lots of waiting.. Most of us just accept it, but when you step back, it's a lot of dead time, which is bad for the customer and bad for the restaurant, which loses table turnover.

Innopay tackles it with a QR code at the table. You scan, browse the menu, order when you're ready, and pay directly from your phone. When you're done eating, you stand up and leave. No bill, no card machine, no hunting down a waiter. The merchant receives HBD, and customers who create an account hold a wallet balance in HBD - earning savings yield in the process, which is also what makes the zero-fee model sustainable on our end. If you want to dig into that further, the wallet is there. If not,it runs quietly in the background.

One comparison that came up during the show: airlines built entire loyalty empires on knowing everything about their passengers. Innopay approaches things differently by giving merchants the operational tools they need to run a better business, without needing to build that kind of profile on anyone. Better service, useful data, customer privacy respected.

On another note, what Hive account@buttcoins said at the end of the show stuck with us: The real path to adoption is when people use Hive without needing to be sold on it first. A genuine thank you to the hosts, and everyone in the audience who joined and asked questions.
The Hive community is deeply focused on the blockchain and the platform itself, which makes it all the more meaningful when they take the time to engage seriously with real-world use cases like ours. A community that already thinks that way is exactly the right room to be building in. 💙