Besides investment cash flow, I don't think there have been any revenue generating ventures that cater to customers outside the Web3 ecosystem.
The true web3 players will be traditional finance companies upgrading their settlement systems.
I am curious how people will answer your second question.
That happens in the US this month, but it has nothing to do with crypto. The Federal Reserve System is launching FedNow, a 24/7 instant settlement system which obsoletes middlemen such as Zelle, Paypal, and Venmo. This is like Pix in Brazil, SEPA in the EU, WePay in China, etc. - a fast payment system run by banks and settled through central banks.
It's much like FedWire, but faster, cheaper, and for smaller amounts. You buy houses with FedWire; you buy dinner with FedNow. It's an inter-bank system, like Visa; you have to have an account with a bank to use it. Chase and Wells Fargo are on board, but Bank of America is not.
This will bring the US up to date with the other countries that have national payment systems.
Anybody in the US involved in moving money around needs to get up to speed on FedNow. Fast.
Solana is the largest of the cheap/fast networks - I’ve worked in Solana for a year - but Aptos and Sui also have solid tech.
You use Safari on your iPhone and unlock your wallet with FaceID.
Right now physical stores that take USDC are generally luxury goods marketplaces, physical art galleries, and PC hardware marketplaces.
No you can’t cancel transactions after you’ve made them, however there are escrow services that provide similar facilities for a small fee.
No it’s proof of stake so the environment is fine.
Personally I jumped into Linux when it was a joke and everyone used Solaris, Python when it was a joke and everyone used Perl, and virtualisation when nobody would ever use it outside testing. I know I’m early in crypto. I hope it will work out but there’s no guarantees on anything.
You mean Solana which has to take its network offline every two weeks or so [1] because it can't cope with yet another error/ddos/misconfiguration/what not?
[1] exaggeration.
Transactions take a few seconds. They must finish within 20 seconds or they time out, and they're expected to take much less time. Here's a technical overview.[2]
The bank to Fed to bank API uses IBM MQ and ISO 20022. These are a bit dated but widely used in the financial sector. Down at the bottom, it's XML.
[1] https://www.frbservices.org/resources/fees/fednow-2023
[2] https://explore.fednow.org/resources/technical-overview-guid...
> Certificate-Based Authentication
Heh, so I can look forward to the biennial banking outage as they forget to renew their certs :-D
But in seriousness, I have some experience with x509 auth from the early days of kubernetes using it and unless the system has some robust CRL mechanisms I look forward to knowing how such a scheme will deauthorize users
Interestingly, they also seem to be doing belt-and-suspenders since the messages themselves are signed with the private key of the institution, which appears to be registered out of band from the system itself
So exactly like crypto except US specific.
Afterwards, if it's anything like SEPA, aside from my joke "bag of potatoes" comment, everywhere. In Europe you can make SEPA or SEPA backed transfers almost everywhere.
The current "same day" ACH schedule is that payments that make into the day's batch must be received at the Fed by 4:45 p.m. ET, a target file distribution time of 5:30 p.m. ET, and a settlement time of 6:00 p.m. ET. It's all batch files.
Anything that re-bills periodically will remain on ACH. ACH handles requests to debit someone else's account with ACH, and they can undo that later. That runs on a 3-day cycle. FedNow has to be initiated from the money sender end.
1000%. The one place where I think blockchain and crypto can have real utility is from large, legacy financial institutions upgrading their very, very, very antiquated backend settlement technology and processes.
Of course, backend enterprise tech is pretty "boring", and the transition will take many years/decades given that our existing financial system currently depends on these old settlement systems that are based on manual, file based-processes from the first half of the last century. This is not the kind of technology transition likely to attract celebrity endorsements or bubblicious "crypto towns" like Miami and Austin.
And what is the actual utility beyond just the (usually unnecessary) upgrade?
https://defillama.com/fees/ethereum
The reason why protocols are able to generate cash flow is precisely because there is demand for blockspace by customers.