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Comment by TechBro8615 | Hacker News Reader

I was fairly into the space in 2014-2016 but stopped paying attention the last few years. It seems like lots of theorized applications actually exist and have a proof-of-concept now.

If I’m building a marketplace business in 2021, where I want to be “crypto-first” instead of relying on PayPal and Stripe Connect, where do I start?

The marketplace sells access to resources with an off-chain ACL system. It facilitates trades between resource sellers and buyers.

I assume I want a smart contract between buyer/seller to record resource grants on chain, which the access layer checks as a source of truth.

But if I were to do this on Ethereum, the gas fees would be really expensive. I’ve heard about Polygon and “optimistic roll-up.” Is this a viable solution?

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> If I’m building a marketplace business in 2021, where I want to be “crypto-first” instead of relying on PayPal and Stripe Connect, where do I start?

Unless you are building a dark web market, why would you want to? It will be more convenient for the vast majority of users to pay with card or PayPal.

I believe there are some use cases. Think of a government which does not allow currency conversion to more stable currencies in a place where volatility or inflation is very high. In that situation, it might be worth adopting a crypto-first approach, no?

But doesn't crypto have very high volatility?

For example, Reserve is a stablecoin designed for markets like Venezuela where it's "illegal" to use USD or EUR.

I'm pretty sure they will make all the stablecoins illegal as well. The fact that they cant really enforce it .. thats something else.

Normal citizens won't need 3rd party stablecoins when cbdcs are available

One reason that comes to mind is trying to be the change they want to see in the world. Cards and Paypal already have heaps of adoption.

The end user won't see a change in their cards though

why does it have to be a dark-web market if blockchain payments are first class citizens? I suppose the general population isn't ready for decentralised payments yet or do you have another reason for such use-case generalization?

There are still many barriers to that "first class" status, taxes are mentioned most often.

Taxes are paid in fiat. Holding non-stablecoins would add even more of a tax headache because you'd have to track capital gain/loss as you enter/exit fiat for taxes / fees / vendors that don't accept crypto

Also the fact that general adoption has been slow so far may be a sign that there is not enough obvious value added for the average person to consider using crypto over fiat.

who would pay with non-stablecoins though? The oath seems to be cbdcs that are compatible with public smart contract blockchains

There's also the risk that stablecoins aren't actually stable but just claim to be such: https://www.coindesk.com/tether-first-reserve-composition-re...

This is a great solution called zk-rollup (zero knowledge rollup) https://zksync.io/

It is just as secure as the base chain (unlike polygon) and has low fees and has been live for the past few months. This is a perfect solution to simple payments.

The difference between optimistic rollups and zero knowledge rollups is that you can’t deploy arbitrary smart contracts to zk rollup, it only supports a limited set of use cases, such as simple payments for now. Read more here https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html

As a side note:

If you as a reader are interested in math & crypto the stuff being done in the zero knowledge space w.r.t. cryptocurrencies is really cool regardless of your opinion on cryptocurrencies in general.

Also zkSync has general EVM compatibility coming in a few months

What coin does zk-rollup use? or just base Ethereum?

It can use any coin. You can send ETH or any token, including stable coins such as DAI or USDC.

the current solutions do 'native fees' which means you pay the fee in whatever you are sending. This can't really last because I could create SPAM coin with 1B marketcap and overload the network with it.

IIRC they'll eventually create their own native token when their EVM compatible rollup is out.

Polygon & "optimistic roll-ups" are generally referred to as L2. In general this part of the etherum ecosystem is just starting up and the only one that has seen much adoption so far is Polygon (which did 4M tx yesterday & still has low fees).

Using an L2 system will mean that your user will need to be using that specific L2 system as well, but the UX doesn't seem so bad (at least for ETH -> polygon, and for the cryptocurrecny space so far).

ETH 2.0 will reduce gas fees somewhat on the mainchain, but it's fairly obvious that there's huge demand, the sharding that ETH 2.0 will do is create 1 shard for execution & 63 for data only. Most L2 systems will mostly use the data shards, so we appear to be heading towards an L2 future.

In short if I were building a company in the space I'd be looking at deploying both on the mainchain (L1) and on a L2 system, but prioritize the L2 system. Unfortunately we may end up in a world where there are dozens or more L2 systems and either the users or the companies have to pay the cost to hop between them.

Realistically, you can't. Unless you want to be a very early adopter, no mainstream businesses are accepting payments in crypto. Techwise, Coinbase has a thing: https://commerce.coinbase.com/

But I've absolutely never seen it in the wild.

Um...that's not strictly the case though? https://blog.bitgo.com/24-major-businesses-accepting-bitcoin...

(Tesla has recanted 'for now').

This list seems silly. For example:

> In a 2013 video, a man appears to be paying for his meal at Subway using Bitcoin in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

And, many are only at select locations, "will be", "unveils plans", and "testing".

I use coinbase to accept crypto payments for virtual property here: https://substrata.info/parcel_auction_list

To add my experience. I looked at rolling out Coinbase commerce a couple of years ago and then again a couple of months ago. I found their current integrations lacked support or were seemingly abandoned.

Contacting general or merchant support often took over 2 weeks to get a response, which was a deal-breaker for any service that would inevitably impact customers on our end.

I'm not even really talking about technical limitations. More that 90% of consumers don't own any crypto. And (more controversially) it has completely morphed into an investment asset class. One that is possibly in a deflationary spiral where no one wants to spend any of it. IMHO it has really failed in it's mission of actually being a currency.

If you want to use microlayments, payment processing checkout the btcpayserver and Bitcoin lightning Network.

Check out Solana if you want lower fees

Low fees - but only once you're in the crypto ecosystem.

If you're after dollars or euros, the on-ramp and off-ramp at exchanges adds a comparable, if not higher layer of fees than existing payment mechanisms, kind of defeating the whole purpose.

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