How a Hackathon Led to Web3 Payments Adoption

Brad: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Do the Woo. I am one of your co-hosts, Brad Williams, joined again by Kathy Zant. Hey, Kathy, how you doing today?

Kathy: I’m doing great. Good to talk to you again, Brad.

Brad: Yeah. Likewise. I’m looking forward to continuing our series in the world of crypto and everything that crypto and blockchains means, especially to store owners and builders. Of course, we have Dave Lockie back here in studio with us. What’s up, Dave?

Dave: Yo, yo, yo. Yeah. All good. Thanks for having me back.

Brad: Yeah. Excited.

Dave: Obviously, haven’t misbehaved enough on previous episodes.

Brad: You’re still here. We’ll see how long that lasts. But as of right now, you’re still here. Now, Bob has pretty good editing skills. So I can’t promise you’ll actually be in the episode. But we’ll see what happens.

Dave: That’s fair. That’s fair.

Brad: But, yeah. I’m excited to jump in. We got an awesome guest here. Let’s bring him on. Sebastian Pape, is that correct?

Sebastian: It’s Pape. Yeah. I like “paper” without the “R.” Thanks for having me, Brad.

Brad: Yeah. Thanks for coming on, Sebastian. So, Sebastian, you’re the founder of a company called DePay, DePay.com, right? So why don’t you give us the big elevator pitch, the high-level overview? What is DePay? And what is it you’ve built over there?

We are bringing Magic: The Gathering to the blockchain

Sebastian: I will start with a story a little bit. When I decided to build DePay, that was at a hackathon, actually one of the biggest in the space in 2020. But that’s not when I started building in the blockchain space.

The origin story is that there was a headline in TechCrunch in 2018. And that stated, “We are bringing Magic: The Gathering to the blockchain.” And the entire concept of digital ownership ultimately made me decide to go down the crypto rabbit hole. On one hand, I was already playing Magic: The Gathering as a kid. I’m not sure if you’re aware of the game.

And on the other hand, I always wanted to explore blockchain technologies more anyway. So in 2018, I started deciding building in the space. One of the first things that I’ve ever built in the blockchain space was an NFT exchange. Unfortunately, it was not opens seat, unfortunately not.

And then the DeFi Summer happened. And for the people that don’t know or don’t remember what happened in the DeFi Summer, it was in summer 2020. And that’s when most of the decentralized finance protocols that we know today were born.

Dave: So give us the name of some of those protocols just for people who might —

Sebastian: Uniswap, Balancer. Basically, a lot of money Lego that we’re building on today have been born in 2020. And DePay is an example of what has been built on top of those protocols.

Dave: And how would you describe “DeFi” for somebody that’s just heard that term?

Sebastian: It’s like money Lego. It’s like inter-operable pieces of technology, often also referenced as “smart contracts,” that allow you to execute something on a distributor ledger or world computer, however you want to call that.

Dave: So give me an example. Tell me, if I go to Uniswap, connect my wallet, what can I do?

Sebastian: Well, you convert tokens. Nowadays you even convert tokens into NFTs too. So it’s just about trading or converting or exchanging things ultimately.

Dave: And the key difference there being there’s no centralized counterparty. You’re not trading with a bank or with a foreign exchange desk. You’re just trading with other people that want to trade at the same time.

Sebastian: Well, ultimately, you’re interacting with the blockchain. But, yeah. You’re trading with or exchanging with other people peer to peer, which is the most important part about blockchains is that they are inherently decentralized and they’re inherently peer to peer. They try to cut out the middle man for all of what they offer on chain.

Brad: And that’s one of the big benefits. It’s not the only benefit. And obviously, benefits are going to vary by who’s looking at it and further implementation. But one of the big benefits of just crypto in general is that decentralization, right? And we’ve talked about it on a few of the past episodes in crypto about how this could really open the doors for e-commerce stores, builders and countries that maybe don’t have easy access to Credit Card Merchant or some other way to accept funds. Crypto is an amazing option for them in allowing these stores to actually sell product when maybe they wouldn’t have been able to sell stuff online otherwise.

Dave: Perfect. Sorry to derail your story, sir.

Sebastian: No problem.

Then came the hackathon

So after the DeFi Summer and realizing that the components required to have a one-click payment experience in the decentralized web, or often referenced to as Web3, was now available. And that’s when I started building DePay on top of those protocols that we just mentioned at that hackathon.

Brad: It’s an ambitious project coming out of a hackathon, I got to say.

Kathy: Yeah. Definitely.

Brad: Usually, it’s like a meme generator or something silly. And he’s over here building how you could accept every possible crypto in your store.

Sebastian: It’s a very intense time and experience. And it’s really good to evaluate an idea in a very short amount of time. I have built other companies in the past. And I have to say that a hackathon allows you to get feedback from an industry very quickly because it’s such an in intense amount of things happening in a very short amount of time, including trying to build a first prototype. You are forced to build a prototype in a very short amount of time. Usually, if you build a business, you take forever to release a product.

Brad: Yeah. You’re just trying to get that MVP, that minimum viable product, something that someone can actually kick the tires on and say, “This is good,” or, “This isn’t good,” or whatever. Like you said, that real-time kind of feedback. But I love hackathons. You don’t hear about it as much obviously in the last couple years with just being able to get together in person and that not happening as often as it did prior.

But it’s great to hear that these things are still happening. And they’re probably starting to make a bit of a comeback, I would hope, because good things come out of this. I remember doing hackathons, I mean, even over a decade ago and just in an entire weekend build a whole startup or build a whole site or solution. It’s a lot of fun.

Dave: Surely, you’re not that old, Brad, a decade? You must have been at school, right?

Brad: I’m not doing hackathons like I used to, I can tell you that. So the idea was stemmed and you started building this at the hackathon. Were you able to get a functional product or something working during that hackathon for people to actually check out?

Sebastian: Yeah. Totally. The first prototype already managed to provide all the basic functionality that we still offer today at a very minimal level. But all the functionalities were there. To name a few, handling and incorporating crypto wallets into the entire experience, doing conversion through decentralized exchanges, allowing for an auto conversion when you perform payments, routing those payments and tracking those payments while having the entire payment itself being settled on chain peer to peer from one wallet to another, from you to a merchant or any customer to any merchant.

Dave: That is a crazy achievement for a hackathon, man. That it’s just insane.

Sebastian: I have to say it was a monthly hackathon, though. Typically, hackathons last a weekend or a week. This hackathon is actually a full month of hacking.

Dave: That makes me feel a bit better about my life.

Brad: I was thinking the weekend build too. I was like, “You did this in a weekend?”

Kathy: Yeah. That’s crazy.

Making it easy to accept crypto payments

Brad: Yeah. Really cool. So talk to us about where you’re at today. I mean it seems like the goal of DePay is just essentially make it very easy for merchants, builders, store owners, WooCommerce or otherwise, to accept crypto payments. Is that the goal of your service and your product?

Sebastian: That’s correct. On one hand, we are building self-host-able software so that we are not becoming in the intermediary so people can host the majority of the software themselves to have those payments being computed because on blockchain it’s all about instructions. It’s a world computer. You need to build those instructions in order for having something happen on the blockchain. And in our case, it’s computing and instruction that potentially includes a conversion to fulfill a payment.

Let’s make an example quickly. Let’s start with fiat money because most people know fiat money. Let’s say we have euro and dollar. And somebody wants to pay a merchant.

And the merchant wants to receive dollar. But you only have euro. Then how typically work is that you would need to convert that through a foreign currency exchange. And you would have multiple intermediary providers to fulfill all of those little tasks.

On a blockchain, you have smart contracts and programs and protocols that allow you to fulfill the same functionalities by computing an instruction that just invokes all of those programs. So on a blockchain, that would just look like take the euro out of the customer’s wallet, convert it to USD and send the USD to the merchant. And what’s so important is that all of this happens in a single transaction, meaning that nobody is exposed to volatility, because if volatility would happen in that split second, the transaction would be reverted. It’s atomic. The entire transaction happens in a hole or not at all, which is a very interesting fact for the technology itself, especially when it comes to conversion.

Dave: And that’s a clear advantage over traditional payment methods where you typically need to wait at least 24 hours before you can get a fee payment settled by a payment processor to your bank. With DePay, you’re basically saying that the instant a consumer pays and that is settled on chain, it’s in your wallet for that same amount.

Sebastian: Correct. Also, a lot of the, I would say, older crypto payment solutions have the same problem. If you take a cryptocurrency that is volatile, let’s say Ethereum, and the merchant wants to receive a stable coin, like USDC, then in a classic scenario where you have the intermediary and you don’t have instant conversion through DeFi, somebody has the risk of the volatility of the asset being converted in the intermediary’s treasury to arrive at the account of the merchant at that provider. Somebody has the risk of the volatility. If you entirely do this on chain through decentralized finance, then nobody’s exposed to that volatility.

Brad: Yeah. Just hearing it and discussing it and understanding it, I mean, what are the downsides? Or are there downsides? Because honestly, it sounds like it’s purely upside. You’re giving more payment opportunities, more people different ways. You accept a lot of different cryptocurrencies. And we can talk about that.

The stores decision to implement with possible limitations

But you’re making it easier for people to pay how they want to pay. And then you’re receiving the funds that you want to receive and the type of funds you want. So is there a downside to this? It almost seems like a no-brainer that every store should look to implement something like this.

Sebastian: I would say there are limitations, not necessarily downsides. Often, there are discussions around non-custodial versus custodial solutions. We are an entirely non-custodial solution, means that we don’t have what’s called the power of disposal over your funds at no time because everything happens on chain wallet to wallet.

But this, often people think that that means that they are also self custodian over their funds, which is not necessarily true because in our example, you can have DePay pay into a custodial wallet. DePay is just a part on chain. It depends on you, what wallet you are connecting. If it’s a non-custodial wallet, like MetaMask, or an entirely full custodial wallet, like the Coinbase custodial wallet, for us, it doesn’t matter.

Dave: It’s just an address.

Sebastian: Yeah. It’s just an address. Correct. There is one example for where you might not be allowed to use it. And this affects, for example, listed companies in the states. They’re not allowed to hold crypto at no time in their books. So they need to rely on an intermediary to convert that into fiat so that they have zero exposure to holding crypto at no time.

Those publicly listed us companies, for example, are not allowed to use such a solution. But we’re seeing regulations in that regard vanishing. For example, one of the first centralized banks start having up to 2% holdings in crypto. And we believe that that’s going to affect even publicly listed companies in the States.

Dave: So one of the key limitations is, for DePay, I’m talking about specifically here because you only deal with payments in the crypto realm, you don’t have fiat on and off ramps, is that merchants who want to accept payments from consumers can only get paid through DePay by people who are on-ramped already to crypto. Now, I know you, Seb, reasonably well, well enough to know that you’d have thought about this. So I am interested to hear your thoughts.

Sebastian: It’s totally correct. When it comes to fiat, that’s where we can’t offer solutions. I personally believe you shouldn’t necessarily deal with crypto payments when you don’t plan to eventually deal with the technology or eventually become a self custodian long term.

Also in regards to fiat, we don’t know yet how CBDCs are going to turn out because if CBDC is going to turn out to be exactly like we know tokens today, then there’s not going to be a difference in the future. If the dollar or the euro eventually going to come on chain as a CBDC, you’re going to have the same functional that we offer today but into the dollar or into the euro instead of a stable coin that is just packed by that fiat currency. So long term, there might not even be a problem. But you’re right. Today we are limited when it comes to an automatic conversion to fiat and trying to get those funds into your bank account.

Crypto as a financial services network

Dave: And we see this a lot. For most businesses, it makes sense to have crypto payment processing as an alternative or an additional payment method with that balance being dependent on the specific business. But just to play this back, make sure I’ve got it right, the people that you think DePay is optimized for are merchants who are building for the future and have conviction that crypto is to become more of the financial services network that a merchant will need.

And I guess a good example of how a merchant might be a good fit to that now is if they are making significant volumes of international remittance, like they are selling in the US but they have supplies in China. So if they’re receiving a proportion of their funds — in fact, let’s not say China. Let’s say a non-specific Southeast Asian country where you have to remit funds internationally because I don’t want to trigger any regulation talk here. But if you are a US business and you know you’re going to have to send some of those funds abroad, if you receive a proportion in crypto, then you can just keep it on crypto rails. And you can use that for more cost-effective settlement internationally anyway.

Sebastian: That’s correct. It’s about efficiency. It’s not necessarily even about the technology. Even before crypto, you had banking wire and you had e-money and you had credit card accounts. They weren’t interconnected.

So you could have a balance on your credit card account as a merchant. You could have a balance on your e-money account. And you could have a balance on your back account. And those three don’t talk with each other. You need to with withdraw it into the other systems in order to make them accessible in the other systems. So that concept is not new.

Dave: The actual state of affairs still with most traditional financial networks is just that the banks provide that sort of aggregation and transfer service silently to provide a better customer experience, right?

Sebastian: Yeah. But you do have that for crypto too. You can convert tokens that you have in your wallet. You can easily convert it to your bank. And that really depends to the region or the local providers. It’s a very local problem to solve because crypto conversion to bank is something that is highly regulated and needs to be done by a local partner. I also believe that’s why we haven’t seen a lot of global covering solutions for that yet.

But I often ask people to pay attention of what bills that they have they could eventually pay in crypto too. Often, people don’t pay attention and realize that actually crypto acceptance is increasing and increasing. For example, in Switzerland, you can already pay taxes in crypto. And people just don’t know about because they don’t pay attention.

So if you have the opportunity to pay some of your bills in crypto, it’s easier to stay in that system because it’s more efficient. It doesn’t matter which system that is. And just move funds from A to B.

Thanks to our Pod Friends NitroPack and WPWhiteSecurity

A general educational measure

Brad: Well, in my area, if I’m working with contractors and stuff, Venmo’s the big tool that a lot of contractors are starting to use to take payment a little bit quicker. But I could see a few years from now where that starts to evolve into more even potentially accepting crypto because again, you can get around a lot of fees. Obviously, there’s reporting around taxes that needs to be done. But it’s decentralized. So there’s a lot of advantages there, I think.

And it’s a matter of education. This really seems like there’s a big educational component to this, I think anything in crypto, because if I’m a store owner, I know my products inside and out. I probably know how to manage my store.

But when it comes to accepting crypto, it’s probably not something I’m familiar with. Maybe I’ve heard it. But I don’t really know if I should do it or not do it.

So I’m curious, what is the educational side of this? How are you helping? Obviously, coming on podcasts like this helps. But what kind of content and training and stuff are you putting out there to get people to start thinking about this, to start deciding if it’s right for them so they can get that information that they need to make those decisions?

Sebastian: I believe it’s like a generational educational measure. So I don’t believe that a single company or a single person could educate the masses on that technology. I think it just happens on their own. I just think it needs more time. Also, I believe it’s very similar to the internet where the minority understands how the internet works or how a browser works or how email works. They just use it. And I’m pretty sure that the same is going to happen with crypto.

Often, people say that people need to be educated. I don’t believe that’s entirely true. Internet is just convenient. Internet is very convenient. If you want to send a message, use the internet because it’s convenient. If you want to get information, use the internet because it’s convenient. And crypto’s coming more and more convenient. As Dave said, international, cross-border remittance is a really good example. It’s just more convenient.

Also, conversion is more convenient because with DeFi, we can literally convert anything to anything at almost no cost in real time without exposure to volatility. It’s very convenient too, because even in the traditional finance system, conversion is something that we don’t see shrinking simply because that’s how technologies evolve. Once they get the majority of the funnel, then they can’t shrink their fees anymore because in order to survive, they rely on the income, they can’t reduce the fees. So I don’t believe that we ever going to see international wire transfer fees vanishing. That’s not going to happen.

Brad: Yeah. I mean on the other side of it too, it’s like if I can accept whatever crypto, it doesn’t matter and it shows up in my bank account as US dollars, I’m happy because that’s what I want. I want US dollars. I don’t really care what you paid as long as I get the dollars I’m expecting to get for that product or that service in a sense. I mean of course, you care. But as long as the money hits your account, you should be happy.

So I wonder obviously with crypto and really just investments in general being very down in the past year or so, does that give people pause to say, “All I hear about crypto is Bitcoin has dropped, whatever, 80% of its value,” even though we all know if you extend that timeline a little bit longer, it’s way up. All right. But at least in the last year, crypto. And it’s not in a silo. Stocks and everything are down. But crypto’s down.

I think a store owner question might be, “Well, if crypto’s down, how does that affect me if I’m allowing people to pay with crypto? Or does that affect me?” As an educational thing, they may not quite understand what that means. I’m curious how you respond to those type of questions or if you even hear those type of questions. Maybe you don’t.

Sebastian: Yeah. We do. We get those questions a lot. But we are fortunate because we started building after there have been stable coins. So people are free to choose what they want to receive, especially when they use DePay.

We have already merchants that prefer receiving native cryptocurrencies, like Ethereum, just because they believe so much in that so that they want to receive Ethereum. Or we also have obviously a lot of merchants that want to receive stable coins backed with dollar simply because they don’t want to expose to the volatility. They know that they can always redeem that 1 USDC to $1. And they can rely on it. So we’re fortunate.

And ultimately, it’s about freedom. People can choose, especially with that technology, they can choose. So they should choose whatever they prefer.

How to get started with a service like DePay

Kathy: Now, if I’m a WooCommerce store owner and I’m seeing some advantages to offering crypto payments, how do I get started with something like DePay?

Sebastian: Well, in DePay’s case, it’s very simple to set up because it’s a non-custodial solution. You simply connect your wallet to the plugin at the admin section so that it enters your address. By connecting the wallet, you don’t need to enter it manually, because if you enter it manually, you could make a mistake. And then if you make a mistake, the funds might be sent to the wrong address.

So once you connect the wallet, the plugin knows where the funds should arrive. And then you select which chains you want to support. And then you select which tokens on that chain you want to receive. So you can decide to receive USDC on Ethereum, USDC on Polygon, for example. And then your customers can use whatever because it’s converted automatically. And you always make sure that you receive what you have configured directly into your wallet.

Kathy: Do you recommend that people be selective about the things that they offer? Does it make the checkout process more complicated for the end user?

Sebastian: Actually, it’s very counterintuitive. We see a lot of merchants configuring a lot of tokens. And the reason why that is not recommended is because during the checkout, it’s going to compute all potential routes. And that makes it very slow to check out.
So we actually recommend to choose as few tokens per blockchain as you can because that speeds up finding a conversion on the blockchain quicker. We are actually planning to make that part of the interface because that didn’t come across yet.

Kathy: Cool. Now, how many merchants do you have using DePay? And how’s it going for them?

Sebastian: We have hundreds of merchants across multiple e-commerce systems. And I think we’re already over a hundred installs on WooCommerce by now.

Kathy: That’s amazing. That’s really exciting. And are they finding success with it? And how are customers responding to it?

Sebastian: They find the setup really simple. There are still some child sicknesses, as we like to call them in software engineering, that we need to solve. There’s an example where the checkout becomes slow because people configure hundreds of tokens. It’s just not obvious. So we need to educate people inside of the plugin to have them choose less tokens as a receivable, because there’s auto conversion.

You don’t need to configure all the tokens, because people often assume that they select the accepted tokens. But that’s not true. You can convert anything. People don’t get that fact yet.

Collapsing the complexity

Dave: Let’s just dive into that one because you’ve just glossed over what, I think, is a really sophisticated bit of UX. So when you as a consumer, as a customer, go and try and checkout on DePay, because you’re connecting your wallet, DePay knows or the DePay service knows what tokens you’ve got on any particular chain in that wallet. And it’s going to suggest the most cost-effective token for you to pay from whatever it is that the merchant’s chosen to receive. So if you’re like, “Well this is priced in AED. But I’ve just got a bunch of USDC in my wallet. But I’ve also got all this other random token stuff lying around.” Maybe then a totally unexpected token is the most efficient way to get you to that merchant.

And so DePay does all of that. It collapses all of this complexity, like, which tokens the merchant want to receive? Which tokens are in the customer’s wallet? Into, “Here’s what we recommend. If you pay with this, it will be the cheapest route for you.” So I didn’t want that to just get glossed over.

Brad: That’s really cool.

Kathy: Yeah. That’s really neat. So it’s actually helping you make some intelligent decisions about presenting those to the customer that, “This is going to be the best route for you. This is the way to go.” So they don’t have to make those decisions.

Dave: Oh, that’s right. “Oh, if you choose this route, we’ll charge you the lowest fees that we possibly can.” I mean that’s just not a user experience that I’m used to.

Brad: Not happening.

Kathy: That’s amazing. Now, that to me is such a unique selling point here that a merchant can actually offer a cost-effective way for customers to make decisions without having to do much of the thinking themselves, that the plugin or the logic there is actually going to help them make better financial decisions. And that’s really amazing. And that’s something that, I think, is really innovative here that WooCommerce site owners are going to want to really look at this.

And this is going to provide such a better experience for the customers, because that’s what merchants are looking for so much is to be able to have friction-free checkout experiences, to help customers make those decisions for them so they don’t have decision — because making a purchase decision in and of itself can be something that causes decision fatigue. And it’s just like, “Okay. Well, I’ll do that later.” And so then they put it off. And that’s why we see so many squeeze pages and, “You’re not going anywhere else.”

So to have a crypto-based payment system that’s actually doing that for people is amazing. So that to me is something that’s really exciting and, I think, lends itself towards WooCommerce site owners actually making the decision to really look at this because we’re always looking for something that’s going to help us make a better purchasing process for our customers that takes away all of that friction. So that’s really cool.

Incentives and behaviors for accepting crypto

Dave: I’m just going to go one level deeper quickly and talk about incentives, which are a really interesting way to think about incentives and the behaviors that we see in them. So in traditional payments, we see that there are fees that are stated. But we also see for those who are familiar with the industry there’re often additional monetization points. So you will see a payment processes making good markup on for foreign exchange fees, for example. And so the payment processes aren’t incentivized to give the merchant and the customer the best possible experience from a holistic view.

There are some cases, some parts of the experience where they’re extremely incentivized to make sure that the payment is frictionless, that it’s fast, that it’s secure. But in other ways, a little bit of murkiness and opacity is actually in their favor. And that’s one of the things that I prefer about the crypto ecosystem is because it’s open, you can’t hide behind this sort of opacity. Everything just happens there.

And so the businesses that, I think, do best are the ones that are just clear about where they’re monetizing. They optimize for delivering value against those fees. And it allows incentives to align much more clearly between the consumer, the payment processor and the merchant. And I think that just over time increments towards better outcomes for all participants. So, sorry. That was just dropping one level.

Sebastian: Totally agree with you on this one is due to the fact that blockchains are typically an open ledger, when it comes to solutions, nobody can hide. And then eventually people are going to just stick with a solution that is doing stuff in their favor. That’s entirely correct.

What’s next for crypto?

Brad: So what’s next for DePay? What’s next for crypto? Tell me about the next couple years in your mind, where we’re headed here.

Sebastian: I already mentioned it earlier, like CBDCs, which is short for central bank digital currencies. It’s the attempt of central banks to tap into the blockchain ecosystem by actually bringing fiat currencies into the blockchain space. That’s very interesting for us as a payment solution because if it’s going to turn out that CBDCs are actually going to get onto blockchains, then they’re going to be immediately available with our solution, which is something that we can’t wait happening because that would be so huge not only for the entire space but also for us as a payment solution and for people in general. So we’re really looking forward how those things are progressing.

But what we also, especially right now, see being mentioned a lot in the space is identity. And the reason why that’s important, especially in the context of payments, is because trust. Typically, trust is a lot about repetition.

You don’t question your door. When you use it, you don’t question, “Is it going to open?” Because you use it so much, you don’t question it. It’s like you just use it. And repetition has a lot of to do with trust. But in the internet, especially with merchants and when you run your own store, when your customer makes your first purchase, he’s not trusting you yet because there’s no repetition.

And identity, something that we see a lot of solutions or teams working on that problem right now, could give you additional information to who you’re going to transact with entirely on chain. So that’s also what we’re looking forward to improve in the future because it can have such a positive impact on crypto payments too.

Brad: Very cool, very cool. I mean I think the future is bright with crypto. It’s fun. I really enjoy these episodes because we’re digging at different tools and services, many that I’m not that familiar with.

So it’s been fun to learn and see the options out there for store owners and builders and creators and WooCommerce specifically, which is what we talk about on this show, but for any store owner to start thinking about how crypto might shape the future of their payments. Again, the bottom line is if you’re selling things online, you want to make it as easy as possible for people to pay you. Get rid of the distractions or just buy the product or buy the service and away we go.

So love seeing these options. Love the ease of use to integrate something like this, especially for the non-techy. This is something any store owner could integrate if they want to. Set up a wallet and away you go. So it’s going to be fun to see it grow.

Dave: I’m going to slip a little prediction in as well if I may. So at the moment, we’ve got this clear divide between this is a website and this is an e-commerce site, this is a store. And some of that is based off the user experience you need, like I want to order nine of these things and ship them to this address. As we see newer generations coming through with discretionary spending to whom the digital environment is actually just as real and just as important as other ones — and I think this speaks to my grander thesis around augmented reality and just the general trend of digital becoming more important. But we’ll see that with younger generations.

I think the idea of e-commerce starts un-bundling a little bit. So you will have that traditional store-like interface. But you’re also going to have much more streamlined experiences where it’s just like, “I’m on this page,” or, “Why not unlock this thing? because it’s on chain, I can do that. I’m connected with my wallet. I can send a payment. I’ve unlocked that content.

I don’t need to go through a whole cart checkout experience. I’m not going to unlock this nine times. It doesn’t need shipping anywhere. You don’t need my billing address.” So you can suddenly insert transactions in commerce in many more experiences and in more seamless ways than heading down that shopping cart conversion funnel. So I’m really watching for those sorts of signals as well where people look at transacting and exchanging value in more creative ways.

Brad: Yeah. It is generationally. Right. And I’m looking forward to seeing, when my son is my age, what this world looks like, especially around crypto and online payments. And I think we all are very optimistic on it. And we can see the future of what this could potentially do and probably will do. And I’m sure there’s things we can’t predict that it’s going to do that we have no idea until it happens. But it’s exciting. It’s exciting stuff.

Learning blockchain technology as a developer

So last question for me anyways. Sebastian, I’m curious as a developer, where did you learn to actually work on blockchain technology, just dig into YouTube videos and just jump into some discords? And I’m just curious how you got into actually developing on the blockchain for anyone that might be interested on the dev side of it.

Sebastian: You just need to get your hands dirty. It’s similar to internet tech where typically schools and universities are decades behind. If you actually want to get knowledge for building stuff at the bleeding edge, you just need to get your hands dirty.

It helps when you have an industry already established. I mentioned the DeFi Summer and how protocols have already established. And they all usually also established best practice. And since the time where open source was the main ethos for writing software, WooCommerce is also back in open source. That’s why it’s worth mentioning here is that allows developers to look how others have solved the same problem.

Really good example is that the only reason why DePay was so quick in being able to build a WooCommerce plugin is because all the payment plugins are open source. You just look at them. You just look at how others are building them. And then evolution or creation can happen so much faster.

Brad: Yeah. I love that.

Sebastian: And it’s very similar to what we see happen on blockchains. Everything is open or a lot at least. And that helps innovating so much quicker. So just look at the stuff that has been built and it is being built. And you learn from it.

Brad: You got the whole manual right there in the code. That’s what I recommend a lot of people as they’re getting the WordPress element is “Open the core files. Start poking around. Don’t change things. But it’s a great way to start really learning what’s happening under the hood of WordPress and start getting real familiar with how to develop on it.” And I love that.

Look at what other people are doing. I mean I learned to build WordPress plugins by opening up “Hello Dolly” 15 years ago and changing the lyrics of “Hello Dolly” to something else, saving it. And wow. I made my own plugin. That’s how a lot of us learn. So, yeah. Get in there, poke around, look what other people are doing and learn from it. I love it.

Sebastian: And learn from yourself and your own mistakes, like trial and error. It’s like you try, it doesn’t work. You try it again, it still doesn’t work. You sleep over it. All of a sudden, it works. And you didn’t do anything.

Brad: A hundred percent. Walk away when you get stuck. And it’ll usually come back to you, right?

Dave: That’s how I describe my journey into development was brute force programming. Just keep trying it till it works.

Brad: Yeah. There’s an element to that for sure to start banging your head. And then when it works and you don’t know why, you’re like, “I’m a genius.” But cool.

Well, Sebastian, definitely appreciate you coming on. It’s been a lot of fun. So obviously, DePay.com is where anyone can go learn about the product and service. Where could people find you online? If somebody wanted to reach out and talk to you a little bit more about this, where’s the best place to reach you?

Sebastian: I think Twitter. I’m on Twitter.

Brad: What’s your Twitter handle so people can find you?

Sebastian: It’s 10xSebastian.

Brad: 10xSebastian. Awesome. And of course, you got DePay on Twitter as well. So awesome. Kathy, Dave, anything else before we wrap up here?

Kathy: No. I’m very excited to see more merchants giving us a go, just experimenting with it, trying it out, seeing how their customers respond to it. So much of web development and so much of what has happened actually with blockchain has been experimenting and trying new things. And I think just being innovators in this space, it’s so great to see everything that you’re doing, Sebastian. And excited to see what’s happening here.

Brad: Can’t wait to see what you come up with the next hackathon.

Dave: All right. Solve world hunger in a month.

Kathy: Yeah. Seriously.

Brad: But it was a month. It wasn’t a weekend. It was a month. Yeah. Great job, Sebastian. Really cool seeing what you’re doing over there. Congrats with all the success.
And if anyone’s out there using DePay, reach out to Bob. We’d love to hear how you’re using it. Maybe mention it on the show. People could check it out and see it in real world. And I know you have some examples on the website too people can check out and play with.

But, yeah. Congrats. Really, really cool product. Check it out over at DePay.com. And for Do the woo, I’m Brad Williams. And we’ll catch you on the next show.