The Problem
Myself and the wider community have no way to implement Firo into our website, blogs or e-commerce sites. At least not without using a centralized service requiring KYC. Therefore Firo misses out on a substantial amount of mind-share in the smaller grass-roots crypto-commerce space.
While there are centralized options such as Binancepay etc. We all know the issues with KYC required services. The process creates friction while being a hindrance to widespread adoption. Not to mention the recent revelations regarding Coinbase pay selling your data to governments etc.
My Proposal
We integrate our coin into MyCryptoCheckout for an annual $750 fee.
Ideally we would actually create our own solution for numerous reasons (more on that later), but this is a fast track way, to at least offer the Firo community a method to accept and therefore advertise Firo on their websites and begin to win some mindshare which then leads to marketshare.
Features Of Service
The features of MyCryptoCheckout Appear to be aligned with the values of the Firo community.
- No KYC requirement to accept payments
- 0% transaction fees (However it does charge merchants a flat $59 annually)
- Payments go directly from the customer to your wallet (P2P)
- Use any crypto wallet you want
- Hierarchically deterministic (HD) wallet support
- 0-conf (mempool) support for some coins (Good for for Firo due to instant settlement by nodes)
- WooCommerce & Easy Digital Downloads Integration
- Real-time exchange rates and conversions
- Simple setup in minutes
How widely used is MyCryptoPayments?
Itās not the biggest, but also not trivial by any means.
According to them below are there stats of their service.
6000+ Webshops
600,000+ Payments Processed
$124,000,000 Total Value Processed
What MyCryptoPayments Requires From Firo
- that your currency runs on a Linux server
- a JSON API that provides
- blockchain height
- block details (transaction IDs)
- transaction details (amount, recipient)
- a blockchain explorer to test some transactions
- The symbol of your currency: i.e. FIRO
From consulting with @devwarrior (Thank you btw).
You can get all the Tx info shown in any firo block explorer using the RPC API. In fact that is how the block explorer gets itās info.
(For now at least ā¦ this may change in the medium term future)
I guess there is also the question of Spark support in the future, that would require the API to allow for a viewkey for MyCryptoPayments to support Spark payment addresses.
Limitations
Right now the service currently supports 180+ coins.
In order for Firo to gain more recognition, merchants would need to select Firo as a payment option, which means they would need to actually know what Firo is.
MyCryptoPayments also has a donation widget, however that only allows merchants to select the big coins. We can enquire whether or not we can pay an additional fee to be included in this list. Especially considering we want to gain āvisibilityā.
The longterm.
Longterm I think we should use CFC resources to build our own service.
We could offer it to merchants as a free service but require Firo be included as a default payment option in return. This itself could be very effective in terms of winning mindshare and acceptance as a legitimate ācurrencyā.
We should also accept all the big coins from the beginning, maybe the top 25.
We can then adopt a similar model as MyCryptoPayments and charge smaller projects to integrate into our service. This revenue can then be used to at least partially pay for ongoing maintenance of the service.
Firoās Opportunity
For Firo to truly capitalize on this opportunity, it requires existing or new Firo holders to enable Firo as a payment option, but we can promote this to our users so they know there is now a Firo option.
The main advantage Firo has now, is that by utilizing CFC resources. We can create products and services that the wider crypto community can utilize. If we can offer these services for free, then this could be particularly effective, as free services tend to have order of magnitude more users than paid counterparts. In return, as could be the case for a Firo CFC supported payment solution. Merchants advertise Firo to their customers automatically every time someone pays them in crypto.
Regarding winning mindshare. This could be a very effective solution. Psychologically when a merchant they respect accepts Firo, part of this acceptance is automatically transferred to Firo. Itās one of the reasons we are often so proud to say āweāre on Binanceā. We know, they know, that if weāre on Binance that we are highly likely to be a legitimate project.
Summary
Letās build roads that lead to Firo. Roads that then can build and increase the size of the Firo network. Thereby helping to bring private payments and freedom to the world!
Please let me know your thoughts and ideas!
Update: Idea for additional use case.
Another use case we could develop with this plugin, is a form of Crypto superchat.
Whereby youtubers, bloggers and others can link to a page on their wordpress website. When their followers click the link, they can send a crypto payment and a message that becomes displayed on the webpage with donation amount etc.
From the website owners perspective, they would just have to embed a [shortcode] on the page they want the crypto superchat to be displayed on. If we use AJAX the comments can be displayed and update in realtime. This may prove particularly popular for livestreamers etc.
This potentially could mean a LOT of advertising for Firo.