Community Proposal - MyCryptoCheckout Integration. Let's start winning some grassroots mindshare!

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?
Itā€™s 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 itā€™s 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 ā€˜visibilityā€™.

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 ā€˜currencyā€™.
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.

Firoā€™s 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. Itā€™s one of the reasons we are often so proud to say ā€œweā€™re on Binanceā€. We know, they know, that if weā€™re on Binance that we are highly likely to be a legitimate project.

Summary
Letā€™s 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.

7 Likes

Below is a link to MyCryptoPayments for more details on their service.
https://mycryptocheckout.com

1 Like

Is this something like BTCPayServer?

Noā€¦ the merchant doesnā€™t need to host a dedicated server etc. to handle payments.
The Wordpress plugin monitors your wallet and waits for confirmation of customer payment.

Literally one click to install pluginā€¦ then add payment addresses.
Then it works with the most widely used stores like woo-commerce etcā€¦

It doesnā€™t get any more simple or user friendly.

For contextā€¦
ā€œAccording to W3Techs, WordPress powers 43% of all the websites on the Internetā€
It powers over 60% of CMS based websites.

Woo-commerce alone powers around 30% of all ecommerce sites on the internet.
MyCryptoCheckout also supports a couple of smaller commerce plugins like Easy Digital Downloads that Walt Disney and some other big corps use.

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Yeah itā€™s an issue Iā€™ve been thinking about, currently Iā€™m with shopify, but Iā€™ve wanted to create another version of my site without KYC that would support firo buy integration was not clear.

Thats what integration with this plugin would solve.

1 Like

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.

4 Likes

I think this is a great idea especially the widgets for e-commerce. The cost is also within the community fund and I think would be a good first use of that fund for this effort.

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If we are able to build our own solution in the medium to longer term. The code in the plugin could also be built into other online services we as the Firo community can offer, i.e. superchats for youtubers and others that may not even have a website.

If crypto centric streamers begin to link to the service we provide (which also advertises Firo) as they want their viewers to donate. That could give Firo a huge awareness boost in the wider Crypto community and all the positives that go with that. Success breeds success as they say.
Obviously I canā€™t vote for this proposal but hopefully the other CFC members will be favorable to the idea.

1 Like

Why? Unless you are closely associated with MyCryptoPayments there is no issue with your vote, no?

ā€œIf a CFC member is an applicant for funding, the member cannot vote on that proposal.ā€

I wasnā€™t sure on this clause, as technically a proposal is an application for funding. However I presume it means if Iā€™m applying to receive funding personally to provide a service.

ā€œIf a CFC member is an applicant for funding, the member cannot vote on that proposal.ā€

I wasnā€™t sure on this clause, as technically a proposal is an application for funding. However I presume it means if Iā€™m making a proposal and applying to receive funding personally to provide a service, then
I canā€™t vote.

I understood it means you are applicant if you are somebody who will receive payment.

Applicant for funding is MyCryptoPayments I would expect.

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Yes I believe this is a very good idea. Direct and indirect exposure to Firo is a must, building projects and services which benefits the Firo community while simultaneously exposing potential users who invest in other coins is a great way too boost the profile of the coin in a indirect way.

Remember the crypto market itself in terms of products and services is still very young and i believe projects which make inroads into this will be the ones too benefit in the long run.

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what is the difference between Coinpayments (the Service Allnodes is using to get Paid) and MyCryptoCheckout?

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Coinpayments:

  • you pay transaction fee (0.5%), no monthy/yearly fee
  • payment goes through them
  • possibility of automatic coin conversion

MyCryptoCheckout:

  • direct transaction to your wallet (crypto goes from customerā€™s wallet directly to your wallet, not through 3rd party)
  • no transaction fee, yearly fee ($59)
  • autosettlement features (connect MyCryptoCheckout to exchange(s) and instantly convert selected coins to fiat or stablecoins)
3 Likes

Also Coinpayments requires KYC to be a merchant.

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this, I hope the transaction can be completed in seconds. i donā€™t want to wait for 6 confirmations (or any waiting time) just to show my superchat on livestream. itā€™s not practical

and ajax, why not use websocket?

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Whatever works, I just happen to be familiar with AJAX.
Well currently MyCryptoCheckout has a 0 confirmation option, so we could also do that.
Zero confā€™s are pretty much instant.

The other part would be the ability to set query intervals within the plugin.
10 Seconds should be doable for most small website servers.

If we offer an account service where people use our web service directly. Depending on the number of wallets to query, maybe we have to scale it back to 30 seconds to reduce server load etc. or we add more server resources.

With that said a 4 core CPU seems to deal with checking/updating hundreds of posts/thousands of comments ok.

I really like the long-term idea. This could be a very good supporting infrastructure and potential of unlimited exposure to new people. For example, if Iā€™m the merchant, I can give x% discount if you use FIRO for payment. And I believe a service like this should be free to get competitive position on the market since more userā€™s adoption mean more value of the service. Nevertheless, this MyCryptoCheckout price is actually reasonable and can be a good short-term solution. But I think it will be good if we know whether our community members (who are merchants) need this immediately or if they like (would like to transact with) the existing merchants that are currently adopting MyCryptoCheckout.

1 Like