Can Crypto Payments Finally Take Off?

Helio, the Web3 payments company, launched its beta this week to offer a much-needed path for faster adoption of crypto payments. Its complete Web3 payments stack, starting with Pay Links on Solana, allows anyone to get paid in crypto instantly using pre-built checkouts or embed payments directly into their store, app, content, game or platform.

Crypto was born on the 3rd of January 2009 when Bitcoin launched and the big promise ever since is that crypto will dramatically improve the way that payments work on the internet simply because it’s cheaper and faster.

Let’s illustrate this with a simple example. Anatoly buys a pair of sneakers on nike.com with fiat money as follows:

Anatoly → Card issuer (his bank) → Payment network (Visa) → Processor (Stripe, etc) → Nike

So, there are at least three entities in the middle, each taking fees and sitting on the money before it moves. It takes a day (and often longer) for Nike to get their money and costs $0.20 + 3% in fees.

Compare this to the crypto money flow:

Anatoly → Nike

With the latest blockchain technology it takes a few seconds for Nike to receive the money and costs a fraction of a cent.

So why haven’t crypto payments taken off?

Sure there is resistance from traditional players like banks but the real reason is that the first-gen crypto payment systems were inferior products to existing solutions so why change. They process transactions off-chain, convert from/to fiat within the payments flow (which is expensive) and don’t support simple requirements such as recurring payments for subscriptions.

Helio has solved these problems to deliver a Web3 payment solution that’s cheaper, faster and offers a better UX. Solutions include:

• Pay Streams: on-chain, time-metered billing to dramatically lower the cost and flexibility of subscriptions, SaaS payments and memberships
• E-commerce: spin up an e-commerce page in seconds to accept crypto payments instantly
• Web3 paywalls: monetise gated/metered access to anything ⇒ events, games, data, video and more
• Pay Links: lower the cost and increase the speed of day-to-day payments such as invoicing, freelancing, services, tipping, split-payments, salaries and more

Helio is completely free to use and requires any Solana wallet such as Phantom, Slope or Solflare. Please visit hel.io to set up your first crypto payment and join the growing Helio community on Twitter.

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