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Comment by zuzululu | Hacker News Reader

read it again, ah this is USDC but not sure if that is still safe, i know tether has a lot of issues and fragility and some very dodgy stuff

so take normal cards then pay out in USDC....is that safe?

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Yes it uses USDC behind the scenes, which is regulated, fully reserved, and designed to stay at $1 (very different to USDT) - there's no Stripe behind the scenes, it's completely independent.

I totally understand where you're coming from, because I felt the exact same, but stablecoins specifically do not suffer from the same crypto crowd problem. They are just a very boring, elegant way of moving money cheaply.

yeah USDC seems more legitimate but banking risk I wonder if it changed since the silicon valley bank situation where it depegged to something like 80 cents on the dollar and USDT still hasn't published their audit despite KPMG signing off on it....

its these systematic risks that makes me wary but I understand your product now and I think that it makes sense but do you need Stripe approval ? how will i take card without stripe ?

stripe is very strict about certain categories

great work and thanks for explaining in detail but as a crypto skeptic I think I finally see one use case here that is legitimate.

my only gripe is "where do i get usdc and how to keep it safely" coinbase, metamask....these things add a lot of friction and exchange fees where i have to turn USDC into USD those have to be considered

A good way to operate this is to keep using a regular payment processor for checkout, but use this for payouts, so you can still accept cards and enjoy fee savings (there's a prompt on the homepage that will set it up for you just like this).

Zoneless is completely independent of Stripe, you do not need Stripe approval or a Stripe account to run it. We have some beginner guides in our docs for handling topping up / exchanges. I use Kraken+, which is about $5/month and removes trading fees.

very good thanks again for your replies ive never dealt with crypto hence these questions i think stablecoins and zoneless makes a lot of sense, stripe connect is very expensive.

for keeping regular payment processor for checkout....is that stripe? aren't they looking and evaluating your marketplace and then saying yes or no still ? or do you mean to use a high risk processor?

You can use whichever you like - but yes you will have to abide by their terms.

Zoneless has an open-source checkout to accept payments/subscriptions via stablecoins if you wanted a completely self-hosted alternative. I am very aware that not everyone wants to pay via stablecoins yet, though. People are very open to being paid with them, hence why it works well for payouts.

Would it work to also charge a modest refundable fee (say $1 per month) from sellers via Stripe or someone else who does KYC, and then use that as a base of "this person has been flagged as known" to solve most KYC concerns in this post?

Yes, this is exactly what it does! To confirm, Zoneless does have KYC built in - its a bring your own API key system that plugs right in, and you get 500 free verification checks per month via Didit. There are guides in the docs on how this all works.

That's a fair question. I've been building Fiber for it — hold USDC without a seed phrase or MetaMask, email login, bank rails if you want dollars. https://fiber.so

I love your product and looks very slick!

Can I play devil's advocate though?

Don't you think in 1-2 years most banks (NA + EU) will offer 1:1 stablecoin conversions and make this no longer a problem?

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