Expanding global payouts with crypto | Hacker News Reader

Expanding global payouts with crypto

stripe.com

87 pointsKishanBagaria42 comments

A few initial thoughts:

- This is a win for the polygon network and USDC adoption

- Twitter payouts is a small (in value) but high profile place to start

- I can see this being great for use cases where your bank might restrict withdrawals based on the activities that resulted in the payout

- Stripe should build a crypto off-ramp. It would be a short-term distraction for them but long-term could position them to be _the_ business bank

I'm unfamiliar with this Twitter feature. Who is using it to make money?

Why would you say twitter is a high profile place?

I'm lost on this. I never seen ads on Twitter and only read it to see if someone really posted whatever news side is posting a tweet.i have never seen anything being driven by twitter

huh? it's used by hundreds of millions of people. I see ads all the time on my feed.

How does polygon generate revenue off this? Or is the idea that there is more liquidity therefore more opportunities on said network which may generate revenue. I think the latter is fine. But curious with the former if there are associated transaction costs.

Whenever an on-chain transaction occurs, MATIC, Polygon's native token, must be spent. It's usually pennies per transaction, but it adds up.

What will be interesting to see is when/if they roll this back. Historically significant announcements like this from large corps are more of a PR play than anything else.

Even Elon/Tesla backed away from crypto less than three months after announcement. They've been (allegedly) looking at it again for almost a year now but given no additional announcement of progress that announcement was quite possibly just another PR move.

Well, it's USDC which is stable and probably is less of a headache to deal with than ETH/BTC. I suppose if not very many people use it, it might not be worth the engineering time to maintain it though.

Isn't USDC a token on Ethereum and some other blockchains? According to this it is 99%+ ETH: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/decentralized-finance/st...

hmm, yeah, wow, I kind of assumed USDC transaction costs would be low, but I'm reading they can be kinda steep like eth.

Those charts aren't loading on my phone, but I presume you mean Ethereum (not ETH, which is a currency). This announcement says explicitly that the payouts will occur on Polygon, not Ethereum. Polygon currently has much lower fees than Ethereum (though the same scalability bottleneck inherently exists).

Why have you omitted that Polygon is also a layer on top of Ethereum?

Because it doesn't affect the price of using Polygon (and because it is only half true in the first place...) making it entirely irrelevant?

I think this has more lasting power. There's a lot of reasons not to take crypto purchases... but that's the merchant's problem, not stripe's problem.

They'd only deprecate it if the end users eventually dwindle to 0 and it becomes more expensive to maintain in engineering hours than fees. Which could happen, but it'll take longer than merchants who dip their toes into cryptocurrencies as a currency and find piranhas.

Musk recently said in an interview that Tesla is waiting for bitcoin to consistently use more than 50% renewable power.

This is pretty cool, having the option to get paid out in USDC will create opportunity for many to hold the payout in USD without the cost of exchanging back and forth, provided that USDC is adequately backed and managed, and there are no critical security vulnerabilities.

As a Russian oligarch, I'm very happy that Stripe is expanding my access to USDC when previously, I would have been prohibited from holding US Dollars, or selling the ones I have! Unfortunately, I'll have to send it through Twitter for some reason, but this is a win for free markets worldwide.

You still need to do KYC

JFYI, Russian oligarchs use USDT

I live in a country that’s unsupported by Stripe and most other global merchant processors.

I’d love to be able to use Stripe for web credit card payments if I could. Hopefully this is a step towards that.

Unsurprising and totally expected. [0][1]

But yet again, we'll see the same old screaming and shouting 'scam' comments everywhere even when Stripe isn't the one scamming and only was waiting for regulations before entering back in.

It's also interesting to see no praise or any critical critique yet on this announcement here with what Stripe is offering and where the exact so-called scam is.

Perhaps the typical screaming and shouting 'scam' comments will only happen in the next crypto / DeFi hack / scam post on HN, but not when Stripe releases something in its product offering about crypto.

Maybe when they say 'crypto has no use case' they cannot deny Stripe's involvement and them using it which also explains that it ruins the skeptics 'crypto scam' narrative and why they hesitate to immediately scream and comment here.

Either way, we'll see but in the meantime USDC looks like a sensible choice for crypto payouts.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31070288

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30629116

This is mostly off-topic, but one thing I’ve taken to when evaluating these announcements is to give the coin a stupid-sounding name and see if the idea still sounds impressive.

“Stripe piloting payouts to Twitter creators in Circle Bucks”

Do with that what you will.

And gmail would have less users if it was called ClownFartMail. Not sure what you’re getting at.

No that's not true at all.

"Instead of sending a letter via USPS, send an instant electronic message via Clownfartmail"

Still seems better to me.

EDIT: Just to answer your implied question. I'm saying that in practice paying out an end user in USDC is the equivalent of paying out a user in any USD-denominated currency (crypto or not). Changing the name of the tech removes the 'gee-whiz' aspect of it and makes you focus on the use cases, which is ultimately what matters and ultimately what crypto struggles to actually deliver on.

I vehemently hate crypto and still I don't get your point here.

But on USDC, it isn't regulated or properly audited by anyone reputable, the fact that sits on Ethereum/Polygon (which also isn't regulated and is riddled with high fees) doesn't give me confidence that anyone will use this token.

Stripe isn't doing anyone any favours offering this service.

USDC is very credible. It receives regular attestations from Grant Thornton:

https://www.centre.io/usdc-transparency

And Polygon is an Ethereum sidechain, so it charges very low fees.

So given these objections are without merit, this feature is doing people living in countries which cannot otherwise receive Stripe payouts a favor.

>this feature is doing people living in countries which cannot otherwise receive Stripe payouts a favor.

And then what do they do with their USDC? Sell it for USD?

Yes, in many places where local conversion of USDC to USD or some other fiat currency is possible, but international Stripe payouts through the banking system are not.

Wouldn't Stripe's efforts be better used in making payouts available in more countries then?

Also, what are the geos where all 3 are true:

1) Stripe can't payout in USD 2) Strip can payout in USDC 3) USDC to USD (or any fiat) conversion is freely allowed

My point, and I don't know how to make this any more clear is 'what is the actually fudging advantage of paying people out in USDC instead of USD, other than it sounding cool?' It's actually wild that people don't ask that question about this kind of thing.

1) USDC still needs to be turned into fiat in order to buy anything with it, so any regulatory/tax advantage is out the window there.

2) The fact that USDC is 'on blockchain' offers no meaningful advantage to the end-user vs. twitter (or any other centralized authority) just deciding to pay people in 'points' that are pegged to 1 USD (that also need to be converted to fiat to buy things)

You’ve posted when the thread is brand new, so I’m sure if you wait a little longer you’ll get the anti-crypto sentiment you seek. That said, paying out USDC is probably the least offensive way to work in crypto and has little room for concern — USDC is mostly dumb rather than problematic.

What problem does this solve for users in major markets?

It's clear there's some form of benefit for users beyond major markets (though those users still need to go through Stripe's KYC process), but for those in major markets, what benefits are there to receive earnings in crypto?

Interesting. Twitter probably has no inflow of USDC, right? So it will have to buy it for dollars. Which will create demand for USDC.

And Polygon is probably a second layer solution based on Ethereum, so indirectly, this will create demand for ETH?

Does anyone else associate "crypto" with "scam" these days? How is this good for them or their brand?

I used to think Stripe's team cared about technical excellence and generally had good ideas.

With their first announcement into this space and now this I'm less inclined to think so and will avoid their business as much as I can.

Totally.

Also hell of a thing to announce on Earth Day.

Not sure if you missed the details of the announcement but they are doing the payouts on Polygon, which is not a Proof of Work network (the technology that is harmful for the environment).

... it's not on PoS yet and it was delayed again. It's been delayed since 2016 or so (I can't remember the first time they announced it was just around the corner).

There's also no guarantee that the PoW chain won't simply continue in yet another fork because profits.

No, Polygon is 100% PoS and always has been. You're talking about Ethereum.

Stripe themselves (in the very blogpost the submission links to no less) mention that they are using Polygon (which is PoS):

> Payouts will take place over the Polygon network

Keybase is owned by some awful conglomerate now, I wouldn't continue using them.

I associate "crypto" with "low fees" and "strong sender anonymity" and "transaction privacy". Really, I view it, especially those like Monero, as humanitarian money- something to act as our digital cash in the absence of sensible governments who would adopt central-but-private systems like GNU/Taler.

Disclaimer: I don't hold any cryptocurrency unless I need to buy something with it :)

> I associate "crypto" with "low fees"

Well, sure, that's because it's not doing anything. It can't be used for any of the purposes that money serves -- unless you live next to a matcha cafe in Berkeley or whatever -- and so it inevitably begets a bank/payment-network transaction in order to actually be spent or saved. Or, as you put it:

> I don't hold any cryptocurrency unless I need to buy something with it :)

[...]

To be clear: I'm not an anti-crypto person, and I think it's as stupid to rage against a technology as it is to rage for it. I believe in the promise of digital cash. But first the candidate technology needs to satisfy the needs it's trying to serve, and none of the current breed of digital currencies (or none of which I'm aware) seem capable of doing that.

I associate crypto with cryptography.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com