Simplifying Crypto Payments for Ecommerce

Dave:
Hello and welcome everyone to another episode of Emerging Tech on Do the Woo with me, Dave Lockie. And this episode I have with me Stijn Paumen from Helio. Helio is a crypto payment partner of Woo. And Stijn’s a super interesting guy. So we’re going to talk about his journey as an entrepreneur. We’re going to talk about what’s happening in the world of crypto and payments, and we’re going to probably speculate about what’s to come as well as the crypto market heats up a bit. So welcome and thanks for joining me, Stijn.

Stijn:
Thank you, Dave. It’s super big pleasure to be here. I dunno if it’s a coincidence that Bitcoin, is it an all time high today?

Dave:
It can’t be a coincidence.

Stijn:
You want certainly a good day in the crypto space.

Dave:
Yeah, it is been a good year,

Stijn:
For sure, for sure.

Dave:
So I guess everyone knows and is sick of me, so give me the intro to you. Who are you and how did you get to be on this show with me today? What’s the summary journey been?

Stijn:
So yeah, I’m Stijn, CEO and founder of Helio. I’m a Dutch guy that lives in London with his family and me and my co-founder, Jim. We’ve worked together for almost 20 years, believe it or not. So we’re kind of seasoned entrepreneurs with a bit of gray hair that have come into the crypto space, but our background is largely building enterprise SaaS companies in the cybersecurity space. We had two previous businesses as a young guy. I joined a company called Scan Save, which was the first cloud security provider for web scanning at the time it was acquired by Cisco. And then with that same team, we started a second business which was delivering cloud VPN solutions to enterprise. And again, that was a 10 year overnight success story. As they say, we built up to 200 people, 35 million in revenue, and we had a great exit in the summer of 2021.

And we really just wanted to do something completely different. Building the same or two very similar companies over 20 years was great, but you want something new. I was also not the CEO in that previous business, I was kind of the commercial leader of that business, part of the founding team, but really together with Jim wanted to kind of do it sort of our way. And we had a six month period of just brainstorming, Hey, what are we going to build next? Is it again in cloud? Is it delivering pizzas with drones? Is it something in crypto? And being in London, Jim and I were meeting up in Region Spark going for long walks and really riffing on different ideas. And we felt strongly that Web3 and crypto is going to be a big wave in the next evolution of the internet and tremendously exciting space.

It wasn’t clear that we wanted to do payments. We attended conferences. We ended up at a hacker house, Solana hacker house in Prague, speaking to a lot of teams that were building in crypto. And what we learned is that hey, everyone is building their own smart contracts. Their own wallet connects to essentially take payments because that’s what blockchain itself facilitates. It’s really reels for payments. And in web two people just use Stripe or PayPal. So we immediately felt, hey, if we deliver some out of the box tooling, then anybody that wants to build on blockchains can just start accepting payments with Helio. That’s kind of when the idea was born.

Dave:
Did you just use the term 3D payment rails or did I hear that in my head?

Stijn:
I think that’s my Dutch accent.

Dave:
Okay.

Stijn:
That to you.

Dave:
But I kind of like that as a visualization, right? Because with normal payment rails, it’s just about sending financial transactions, but crypto rails allow you to send other stuff as well. You can send information, you can send transactions, you can send anything that can be contained within information. So pictures of cats or shares in a business or anything else. So I kind of like that visualization, even if it was an excellent,

Stijn:
Yeah, that’s a good term.

Dave:
Minted here today.

Stijn:
And speaking of inscribing cats, what’s your take on orals? That’s kind of a big wave at the moment, isn’t it?

Dave:
Yeah. So let’s just define our terms. So the last cycle you may have heard of NFTs and projects like crypto punks or yacht club or pudgy. Those are collectibles on the Ethereum ecosystem. This cycle, there’s a lot of narrative around ordinals or inscriptions. I’m personally still not entirely clear about what’s what there, but it’s basically NFTs on Bitcoin and it’s the same idea, right? You’re putting data that describes a non fungible asset. So each ordinal is different or can be different from the other. One monkey might have green hair, one might have blue, and when you’re buying one, you’re buying that specific one with green or blue hair, you’re not buying a monkey token. Yeah. Is that a reasonable

Stijn:
Definitely. Yeah. I think it is very much NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain. The one big difference that the Bitcoin Maxis key pointing out is that with Ethereum NFTs and with Solana NFTs, you are kind of hosting the metadata on the blockchain and typically the actual image is stored on a server somewhere else and kind of the metadata points to that server. And Bitcoin Maxis will say, Hey, what’s unique about orals is that it’s actually inscribed in the Bitcoin blockchain within a block and it can never be changed.

Dave:
So there were NFT projects that did that as well, but you’re right there, majority of them were hosted at least part of the content on either a crypto adjacent or even just a straight up web two bit of infrastructure. So yeah, look, I think orna are going to go nuts the same way that NFTs did, but for me it’s all part of, in Solana has NFTs as well. I think it’s all part of this broader human intersection of things that people care about. So they care about status and having one of a set number of things is a status thing, especially if it’s ridiculously expensive. I think it speaks to Ingroup Outgroup dynamic as well, which is really powerful for people as well. People want to have a sense of belonging and some of them, they’re objectively cool bits of art, some great artists producing stuff and people love aesthetically pleasing things. So for me, NFTs are kind of this real heady mix of a bunch of different base human desires. And I think Bitcoin’s the biggest crypto ecosystem in terms of value. And there are a bunch of people sitting on a bunch of money who’ve got nothing better to do with it than buy picture of the monkeys. So yeah, I think they’re, they’re going to do well and I wish I’d bought more of them sooner is,

Stijn:
Yeah, and I think that’s,

Dave:
How about you thinking same?

Stijn:
I like relating it back to payments. So I think that NFTs in general have been an amazing playground for innovating in payments because what we’ve seen in the Ethereum space and also Solana to a certain extent, people are building communities around these NFTs and then they’re also selling merchandise. They’re selling hats and caps on WooCommerce and they want to do that in Ethereum or Solana or USDC. That’s one thing. But then also, hey, offering discounts, right? Hey, when you hold this collectible, when you’re part of the group, sure you’ve got this status symbol, you’ve got a flex on Twitter, but you also get discounts or early access to certain things in the physical worlds. So that’s really, really interesting. And then maybe things like gating based on those NFTs is very interesting. And then also now with Ordinals, what we’re seeing as you see a ton more Bitcoin payment volume, because a lot of these decentralized wallets, and I think experts is a great example, but also Phantom has added Bitcoin support and Magic Eden has done that. And you just see, to your point, a lot more bitcoins that might’ve been locked up in hidden wallets, they’re now being spent because people have been innovating through orals to actually unlock a little bit of utility bitcoins to be spent. So that’s really a great thing to see.

Dave:
Yeah, that’s a great point. And there’s a general principle I think, which is that the more liquid a market, the more valuable the assets within that market becomes. So as people take their Bitcoin out of cold storage or they buy more, then that’s going to increase the liquidity for Bitcoin and that should increase the value of Bitcoin. But there’s also the importance of, and we’re getting a bit down there to rabbit hole here, but Bitcoin currently generates revenue. The network generates revenues in two ways at the moment. It generates revenues through fees, the miners charge for processing transactions and it also offers rewards for those miners for mining blocks, for basically keeping the chain up and running and intact. And over time, the block rewards are halving that you might have heard of the Bitcoin halving. That is the rewards are designed into the Bitcoin protocol to halve every four years I think it is, until essentially there are no rewards left for miners and it’s only fees that support revenue generation in the Bitcoin network.

And that’s important because revenue generation, the fees are the long-term future of Bitcoin security model. And if people are just sitting on their coins not doing much with them, then potentially miners aren’t generating many fees and the security of the Bitcoin network suffers when people are using their coins, then they’re doing transactions, they’re getting charged fees, and that’s contributing back to the security of the network. So I think from that kind of economic perspective, it’s a really good thing for Bitcoin. I’m like a crypto maxi, I’m not a maxi on any particular coin. And it’s really good to see Bitcoin learning from what Ethereum’s done and taking some of those ideas and folding them into what they’re doing. And I’m sure they’ll come up with stuff that’s different and that Ethereum can learn that from and Solana can learn from. And for me that’s a healthy and vibrant ecosystem, not to have one dominant whenever to have them into play of different competitors that are always finding different edges and helping us explore that space.

Stijn:
Yeah, no, I couldn’t agree more. There’s going to be plenty of winners in terms of blockchain, so I believe that too. And the parallel that I sometimes think about is maybe big tech, right? If somebody had asked you in even the late nineties to say, okay, 10, 15 years you’re going to have four or five companies that are worth more than 1 trillion, people would’ve said that’s madness. But that’s what happened, right? And they were each good at a certain use case. Facebook

Dave:
Mean, do you just have a Google account? No, right? You’ve got a Google account, Facebook account, Microsoft, you have an account with all the big tech giant

Stijn:
And yeah, we already start to see that certain chains are better than others. Solana is great for payments. Ethereum is obviously

Dave:
Defi,

Stijn:
Defi, and the first one really to introduce this concept of smart contracts, bitcoin store value, and there’s a lot of exciting new chains coming along, right? You’ve got layer twos base, which is a Coinbase commerce layer two, they’re doing a ton of interesting things, forecaster, right? The social network, maybe we’ll talk a little bit about that today.

Dave:
Let’s do that because we’ve actually put up some bounties for forecaster. So what don’t we get off at the forecaster stop of our conversation train and talk about that for a little bit. So forecaster is a, I think the founder describes it as a sufficiently decentralized social network. So your account is a crypto wallet and that crypto wallet is your id, but it can also hold tokens, it can hold Ethereum, it can hold USDC. And there’s a couple of tokens that people have created just for use on forecaster as well. So experience wise, you can basically imagine it’s Twitter, but with crypto wallet attached. And that was kind of it until earlier this year. Perhaps you guide us through the emergence of frames and what design space that opens up.

Stijn:
Yeah, I think the frames in the forecast, or actually the social network is called Warp Cast, if I’m not mistaken. But Forecast is the underly. You’re not

Dave:
Mistaken, you’re totally right,

Stijn:
The underlying protocol. But when you start using it, it does feel exactly like X, right? Create an account, you can post, you can repost, you can follow, you can. And then there’s this concept of frames, and it’s almost a way to think about its little storefronts inside of your social media posts on broadcast. And then of course users that are reading your posts, they can see that frame and then interact with it. And it’s very transactional because again, going back to NFTs, a lot of these frames you are minting NFTs. So you’re spending a little bit of crypto to take ownership of that digital image there. And that digital image can maybe represent something physical in the real world that you can redeem. You can imagine, let’s say Nike through their cast accounts, posting a frame where you could purchase a certain pair of Jordans, you mint a pair of Jordans that you can then go and redeem for the real ones in the real world.

So that’s kind of a flow that people are experimenting with. So minting these digital collectibles through frames, but then also we’ve started seeing folks launching mini stores like almost Shopfronts. And at the moment, some of those frames are still linking outside of the webcast application, but ultimately the idea is that you can purchase directly on the blockchain through these frames. And that’s really going to be driving crypto commerce because folks have a wallet attached to their social media accounts. They can purchase essentially digital goods and physical goods on that social media platform using the money that they have in that wallet. And that seems to be sort of the starting point, but who knows where this is going? But I think this notion of having a frames storefront within your posts where you can as it creates and monetize on chain, I think that’s the starting point of this model. And it’s definitely interesting. We’re looking at it and we’ve got this concept of pay links and we’re looking at the building out some functionality to make those pay links compatible within webcast through frames. That’s an exciting opportunity.

Dave:
Yeah, thank you. That’s a great intro. If you are used to using X, most of the time you’re just seeing text or images or video or whatever, but sometimes you see something that’s a bit different. So if somebody’s doing a broadcast on X, it has a different look and feel. It’s like a little app or if somebody runs a poll, then it has its own UX as well. It’s like a little standalone app within a tweet or a sheet or whatever they’re called. And forecaster basically is an extension of that, but it’s an open app space. So it sits on OpenGraph, which is a standard for metadata that came out of Facebook, like your standard WordPress or WooCommerce site has open graph data. A lot of websites do, and that’s what graphs, sorry, frames are built on. And yeah, I think if you can imagine a little interactive app that is helpful or useful or fun in some way in the context of a social feed, then that’s the design space for frames.

And I’ve done everything from playing little games to minting NFTs to voting on things and what’s coming I understand next or something that’s coming next is like a text field so that you can submit text from within a frame. And obviously that’s going to be a straight up link through to either kind of command line type interfaces for games or applications or even into LLMs as well. So you’ll be able to do sort of giving instructions as well as just clicking buttons. So yeah, I am really excited about this Paradigm and WooCommerce Automatic have put up five grants underneath each. So one eighth, which today is like three and a half thousand dollars heading towards four people to build a call frame that integrates with WordPress or WooCommerce and frames. So you can find me on webcast, I’m divvy dovey eth, and the details are there in my feed, and you can reach out to me if you’re interested in the closing date for the grants is like the end of March, and we’ve had some really good applications through already. So don’t hang about do reach out if you’re planning to do something, so I can give you the best chance of success. But yeah, I think this is where open source and open stuff can win, and I’m really excited to see it happen.

Stijn:
That’s really awesome. Maybe we should take a look at those grounds, Dave, and see if we submit some of our ideas. Yeah, sure. I’ve seen a few. There’s something called Warp Shop X, Y, Z, so I’ve seen a few popping up. I also know that Coinbase commerce has done some cool stuff, but I think it’s huge for crypto commerce. I think the way you described it, you’re super excited that basically any interaction on the social network is going to be fully decentralized and recorded on the blockchain, but it’s permissionless. So it’s great for things like polls and floating, as you say as well. But of course, with my payments hats on, I always think about commerce and it’s also a great very targeted audience. If you are a merchant that wants to reach people with a crypto wallet because those wallets are funded and has liquidity to unlock and it’s an opportunity for you to sell into that audience, then this is a great targeted group of people that you can go and hang out with and build cool little apps to sell to. So yeah, it’s a really cool innovation. Are there any other social networks that you’re excited about in the decentralized world?

Dave:
Yeah, so I’ve, I mean, I guess part of my thesis is social plus finance plus everything. It’s like a convergent experience and the feed sort of swipeable feed is the default experience that people just have been trained to. It seems to be like optimum, at least for a smartphone age. And when you add in that information with the social graph, you end up with social networks, I can post this, it can go out, people can riff on it. That’s been really interesting. When you add financial rails into that, I think you open up even more creative space. So we’ve seen people create currencies just for use within forecaster. And I will answer your question, but I just wanted to loop back on this one.

And I think one of the things that we could see this crypto cycle is somebody waking up having a great creative idea and going to bed a millionaire because there are no thro on distribution or payments. You don’t have to onboard anywhere. You just push something up, it’s got a mint price goes viral, and you go to bed with a thousand leads in your whatever or whatever. I can totally see that happening. But something that I’m particularly passionate about and why I remain extremely excited about my role here is that when you look at commerce, when you look at payments activity, there’s a vast amount of payments for goods that run their $5. It’s coffee or it’s little bits and pieces, but we don’t really do that in terms of digital experiences. So we’ll buy an ebook, but we don’t buy a blog post, we’ll buy an audiobook, but not a
Podcast, et cetera, et cetera. So there are a couple of things. I think the first is it’s actually just not very cost effective to use traditional payment rails to do small payments because the credit card companies or the PayPals will charge you a decent fee. I think it’s like 40 cents for PayPal if it’s under $5 or something. It’s quite high fee compared to the overall money you’re making. And then it’s also the friction like, oh, I’ve got to sign into PayPal and one time password and send the funds and blah, blah, blah. It’s just a high, it’s relatively high friction, relatively high cost for what seems like very little return. You introduce the mechanic of collecting of like, oh, I’ve actually got something for this. It’s not just that I like this tweet, it’s that I can put it in my library of things that I like.
I can look at them all later, or maybe it’ll be worth something, maybe I can sell it. But when you have a funded crypto wallet that is already connected, a super cheap to do even very small payments, so it’s cost effective, and B, it can be totally seamless with the user interface. So on forecaster, you can just hit a button and you send people warps or DJ N, or you can just type a slash command as you can, send people funds as easy as you can do anything else like retweet, send funds. So I really hope that it’s going to open up this more lucrative and exciting space for the creator economy where people can just say, look, I’ve got a great idea back me. I’m going to do this, and people will do it. And we’ve seen lots of examples of that happening already, and my hope is that this little niche, this little corner of the digital ecosystem is going to see some real success stories and people are in the web two space, they’re going to go, hang on, what?

And these guys can’t be platformed and forecaster are taking 80% of their revenue. This is great. Let’s go over there guys, because they’ll be able to reinvest their energy in things which are more directly benefiting them and their audience. So yeah, I think these social platforms, to answer your question, hey is another one, hey, xyz, and I think they’ve just had a new native token bonsai airdrop to active users. So I think we’re going to see a bunch of this stuff, whether it’s social networks, adding crypto features or it’s crypto wallet, it’s adding social features and there’s just a big convergence coming and it’s going to be just a very heavy design space basically. That was a really long answer then. Sorry.

Stijn:
No, it’s all good. I mean, I think what you touched on as well is this airdropping to incentivize folks to come to your social network. I think a lot of crypto rides on speculative use cases, so users wanting to make a quick buck, and what we’ve seen already is with a bunch of play to earn type models, it’s not really sustainable. So what I really like about forecaster is that they’re not doing that. They’re not saying, Hey, come and join your network. You get a ton of tokens and once you’ve got them, people disappear again.

So yeah, I really like their approach and what you mentioned about micropayments and essentially identity, because your crypto wallet is also your identity. You don’t need to say that you are Dave on the social network. You can stay anonymous and people can really express themselves in different ways anonymously, and you can still accept payments to your public key. If you deliver a cool software program or a great contents, people can just send you one US DC or warps or whatever token it might be through the network to your wallet address. That’s a really cool way of monetizing. So yeah, I agree. People express themselves differently if you don’t need to say who you are, and it’s just lowering the barriers to transactions. I don’t need to sign up with an email address and a password and my home address in order to transact and exchange value with the creator. So yeah, it’s very exciting.

Dave:
And you can see this also playing out the other side of this or one of the other tributaries, I guess to this convergences meme coins like this crypto cycle already seems to be meme. Coin season Bonk was one of the early instigators on Solana taking a mickey out of Ethereum where we’ve had dog with hat, we’ve got Cat with hat, we’ve got last cycles Doge, we’ve got all these stupid meme suits jumping off and making people like millionaires overnight. But I think if you kind of squint and look at them, it’s like, well, you get memes go viral on social media and meme coins are going viral on crypto networks. Well, when those are the same thing, when the memeing and the social and the financial are all knit together, it’s just pouring more petrol on that, isn’t it?

Stijn:
It is. Why do you think people are buying these meme cards? Is it the unlimited upside? Is that the kind of play here? So putting $200 in and emerging as a millionaire,

Dave:
I think that drives a lot of the behavior is greed and hope. But I also think there’s this interesting kind of almost generational dynamic at play, which is that I think a lot of people get into crypto because they’re sick of the construct that you’re born into with traditional capital and markets and money. And when the money is working, when the economy, when money is working for people, then nobody cares. Everyone can have a nice life, buy a new car, buy a tv, blah, blah, blah. But the story over the last 30 years or so has actually been a decreased spending power as currencies have become devalued to the point where even people who both parents are working, they’ve got good jobs, they’re still struggling to make ends meet, and now there’s an alternative which is not bound up with all these prior power structures and people can create new economies and new money.

And I think a bunch of people had basically said, your money stinks. We’re not going to use it anymore. We’re going to use our money. And that was Bitcoin really. That was the genesis of that is the chancellor bails out the banks for the second time, this is corrupt. Let’s do something better. Let’s do something different. But there’s a bunch of people that were late to Bitcoin and now Bitcoin’s like 70 K or whatever, not many gen Zs can buy a Bitcoin. So the same thing happens. We’ll just create our own money, and because we’re young and don’t DGAF, we’re going to create a coin that’s got a picture of a dog with a hat on it and screw you. It’s kind of cyclical thing to this and where that goes, I don’t know, because when anyone can spin up a currency and if enough people believe in it than it has value, how quickly can that happen and what happens when you’ve got 50,000 of these currencies? How do you have any sort of store of value? I don’t know. But anyway, another long answer for you, Stein.

Stijn:
I think you’re right with this sort of fuck you mentality that people are like, it’s a bit of hope and greed, but a lot of it is also driven by folks in countries where the system isn’t working for them,

Dave:
But the dollar is not working for ’em. They load their own native currency.

Stijn:
Exactly. They want a different play. And yeah, it’s probably a generational thing as well. So I was speaking to another founder in the Solana ecosystem. They built a really cool app called Candy Pay, also great payments app. And I got on the phone with them and I thought, okay, this is an experience entrepreneur in his mid thirties, maybe in his forties. He started this company when he is 17, he’s now 19 years old, and he’s in Calcutta, he’s attended a few hacker houses, got hooked on this notion of decentralized money and started building. So if you’re going to have an army of people around the world that just with an internet connection and a laptop can build companies on the blockchain, I think there’s a huge wave of innovation that’s about to come. And I think what’s missing for a lot of these younger entrepreneurs is maybe a little bit of, okay, how do you run a business? How do I raise a bit of money to get this idea a bit further? How do I deal with customers? We also, in our space, we try and help slightly younger entrepreneurs streamline some of their ideas into proper businesses rather than just chase the DGen money online.

Dave:
Yeah, one of the ways I’ve heard the evolution of the web described is that you had web one protocols, which were essentially like the open standards, TCP ip, htt, P and SMTP, all of those things where the web was essentially permissionless. Like you could hit an endpoint, you could do stuff with it, you could send an email. We then grew into corporate networks, which is essentially the Googles, Facebooks, et cetera, and suddenly you need an API key and KYC for everything. And that’s the corporate network world, which was becoming irretrievably dominant until blockchain crypto networks like permissionless, decentralized networks emerged as an alternative to them just as web one protocols didn’t go away when corporate networks emerged, neither will corporate networks go away. But I do think that the crypto stuff allows for that permissionless innovation that allowed web one to give birth to web two for that value creation and those entrepreneurs to realize their dreams. The Silicon Valley story really is all born off the bedrock of those web one protocols, and I think you’re exactly right. The crypto protocols are going to let a new generation unlock value built off the back of these permissionless decentralized protocols too. So yeah, I mean, I’m here for it, Stein, I’m here for it. Yeah, let’s try and take our heads out the sky and bring it back down to Earth a little bit. So Helio has an extension for WooCommerce. You are a partner. You can find the Helio extension on we.com.

I think it really showcases the product and startup and I guess the application heritage that you and Jim bought to the business. It’s a very merchant friendly, very considered experience, and part of that lives within the extension and part of it lives on your own hosted dashboard, whether it’s WooCommerce or because you also operate extension Shopify or just commerce generally. If you’re a Woo developer and you’re thinking like, okay, but how can my clients make use of this? Or if you’re a woo merchant, you’re thinking, okay, but how can I actually use this stuff? How can I make some of this dog money? What are you seeing merchants do? How are they implementing crypto and Helio to help their business succeed? Yeah,

Stijn:
So crypto payments, they enable a whole bunch of different things. At the core, as we’ve discussed, it’s a peer to peer payments. So that’s why it’s very different to a card payments, right? There’s no intermediary. Even when you use Helio as a method of payments, as a merchants, we don’t ever touch your money, so we never take custody of funds. It’s just that the plugin that we have for Woo has a simple widget inside it where the buyer can connect their crypto wallet and then select the currency that they want to spend and then hit the pay button, and then the merchant instantly receives that money. It also means that we don’t need to share a lot of fees with banks or other payment processors. So I think instant money in your bank account or in your crypto wallet in this case, plus very low fees, in our case, 1% are two great advantages of crypto payments and using Helio and other examples within Bull.

But it’s not the reason, the number one reason why merchants decide to sell with crypto. I think where we’re seeing that merchants get really excited is if they can drive more sales and actually reach an audience of crypto fluent people that have money in their wallets. So there’s dog money that you talk about and they’re willing to spend it. So if you consider that there are a hundred million crypto wallets around the world, more or less, and together they now hold $3 trillion, almost that money needs to flow somewhere because people are not just going to sit on their Bitcoin forever or their Ethereum forever. They want to spend it. So I think it’s a huge opportunity for merchants in general to tap into that audience. Where we see success with bull merchants is people that have a little bit of a crypto flavor. So they tend to be, maybe merchants run by an entrepreneur who likes crypto themselves, they have a little bit of experience with it, for instance.

Or we have a merchant called Hive Mapper, which is selling decentralized hardware. So they sell webcams that people can then put in their cars, drive around and help hive mapper map out the world as a competitor to Google, and they actually get rewarded with tokens for that. So these are the type of merchants that have a little bit of crypto exposure already. And I think in the short term, that’s where we see a lot of installations. So crypto fluent merchants that get it and they want to unlock more sales. I think in the medium term we’re also going to see a lot more money proliferate as decentralized wealth grows and more users have wallets, then I think people will start demanding from their merchants, Hey, why are you not also offering crypto payment options? And from that point of view, I think it’s going to follow this similar trajectory as other payments innovations by now pay later. I think that’s a great payment innovation of the last

Dave:
Pay, all of those things,

Stijn:
Those are all great payment innovations, and it takes probably five years before you get to early maturity around maybe 10% of people are using those payment options, and then it will really explode. Yeah, we’re really focused on enabling these merchants that understand crypto and they want to sell more, reach those users with wallets, and then I think it will start proliferating quite rapidly. And we might even see that in this kind of Bitcoin cycle. You spoke earlier about the every four years as a new Bitcoin cycle because the hash rate halves that’s happening in April. So maybe between now and 2028, you’re going to see hopefully upwards of 10% of merchants on WOO with the crypto payment options enabled in their store. So that’s what we expect to happen.

Dave:
One thing that I think is important for merchants to realize is that I think there’s, broadly speaking to flavors of crypto, one is a Bitcoin or an Ethereum where a Bitcoin is worth a variable amount of US dollars or euros or pounds. One day it could be worth 65 1 day it could be worth 60. It’s a market, and you can expect there to be volatility compared to your standard issue dollar pound or Euro. But there’s also a category or a class of cryptocurrencies called stable coins. I’ve heard them described as crypto dollars as well, like the kind of dollar or euro dollar. Maybe you could just give us an explain it like I’m five about stable coins and why those might be a kind of attractive entry point to more traditional merchants.

Stijn:
I also like the term digital dollar, which is or stable coin. So the important thing is that it’s fixed to typically a fiat currency. Of course, the US dollar being the most widely used one around the world, so U-S-D-C-U-S-D-T are the two biggest stable coins, and they’re actually backed by US dollar reserves. So the issuers of these stable coins, these digital dollars actually stack real dollars in order to back up the price. So it’s very much linked to the actual dollar. And it means that we take out any volatility from merchants, right? Because rather than if I’m selling a cap for $50 and I take payment in Solana, let’s say half a Solana for that cap the next day, maybe that half a Solana might only be worth $40. So I think if I can just accept $50 in digital dollar equivalents, then I know that I don’t have any currency risk and it’s very easy for me to redeem those digital dollars for actual dollars.

Typically, you can offer ramp them through an exchange like Coinbase, or if you’re a business, you can also do that directly with the issuer of the digital dollars. So a circle is the issuer of USDC that you can create an account, hook up your bank accounts, and then let’s say if you receive your 50 USDC through WooCommerce, you can then go ahead and redeem that for real dollars. So it’s a great innovation to just remove any volatility out of digital currency payments. And if you look at our platform, most folks expect that the majority of our payment volume is in stable coins, but it’s actually not. It’s about one third is in stable coins and about two thirds in typically the native currencies of the blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and some merchants that believe in the upward price movement of digital currencies also prefer to accept payments in those currencies because they want to maybe keep it as a treasury strategy. And it depends a little bit what you’re selling, right? But if you make a healthy profit margin on anything you sell through your WOO store, you could also say, Hey, actually I’m going to stack 10% of my digital currency income. I want to keep that in Bitcoin because I want to grow my treasury. But of course, if you’re a business that operates on very thin margins, then I think stable coins are the way to go to really hedge against any risk.

Dave:
Yeah. Thank you. That’s a great introduction. And I guess one other, I guess a couple of key advantages of stable coins, very fast transfer as well, payments directly into the wallet. You as a merchant get paid redeemable US dollars very quickly. There’s no delay for deposits, also possible for anyone to acquire. So dollars, you’re kind of stuck with your currency, and depending on the country you live in, capital controls can be looser or tighter. So if you’re in Argentina, the government’s not keen on you getting hands on dollars, but actually dollars are a good way for Argentinians to keep their wealth because it’s devaluing less than their currency, and that means that they can transact internationally as well. So where you have big trading blocks like South America that aren’t on a single currency can be really useful if you’re in Argentina or buy something from Brazil, you can transact in USDC and that kind of international remittance and universal availability of stable coins. I think as we have increasingly global supply chains, whether that’s B2B, B2C, to me, it just makes sense. Why would you not want something that is universally available, cheap to send and pegged to your real world costs? Just stack

Stijn:
Plus speed, right? The instant settlement part is just so important of this. And

Dave:
Yeah, no chargebacks. No chargebacks or no refunds except the ones that you control. So obviously you have to comply with your local laws, consumer laws, business laws, whatever. But it keeps you in control of how you want to run the business as though fear that the card company or the bank is going to reach into your account and take out funds without your so-So, so for some businesses, particularly in high risk sectors, that’s probably an advantage for other companies. Maybe it’s just added admin and overhead and aggro and they’re happy to use the payment card rails. But this is all about introducing choice and optionality for merchants and their customers. For me, I really appreciate you exploring it with me today, Stan. It’s always a fun chat.

Stijn:
Yeah, same here. The future of commerce is going to be rooted in digital innovations like crypto, no doubt. And it’s great to see you guys are leading the way. So I think the crypto ethos just fits super well with the decentralized approach to commerce that BOO is spearheading and it’s a very different model to a Shopify. Yeah, so I think a lot of the crypto friendly merchants will be using wool versus a Shopify where it’s a lot more walled gardens and kind of less choice for merchants and buyers. So yeah, it’s a pleasure to be supporting you guys.

Dave:
We just want to make sure everyone has got the freedom to sell, the freedom to transact, and Shopify is a great solution. They play on the road a lot of the times, but we’re open source. We have different values, different mission. And to be honest, as long as people are making a living online and selling successfully and creating value for themselves and those around them, they come happy wherever they’re doing that. And hopefully they’ll do that with Woo.

Stijn:
100%.

Dave:
That’s all. Well, thanks for your time, Stijn. I’m sure we’ll chat soon and hopefully there’ll be a craft beer involved.

Stijn:
Let’s make that’ll happen. Let’s hope it’s in the south of Europe, not in rainy London next time.

Dave:
Amen. Alright, be well.