In short, I think we need both centralized and self-hosted but the immediate need should be to get an easy way to accept Firo today that also accepts other major cryptocurrencies. Developing a native solution for Firo alone would be nice and important in the long run but would most likely be limited to a few hardcore users.
In short the system should:
- To prompt users to pay a FIRO amount to a particular fiat value
- Allow customers to pay to Spark addresses
- Allow the merchant to recognize payment and track the status of payment
- Accept other major cryptocurrencies as well since no one wants to implement multiple solutions for different coins.
The lowest barrier to entry is to consider reactivation on NowPayments.io with Spark payment support. I have a call scheduled with them on Tuesday to explore this. It would likely need some payment and integration work and also some of our Firo community actually integrating and using it to prove to them it’s something worth supporting.
Another one we can approach is Coinpayments.net which already supports FIRO but only the transparent addresses. Interestingly XMR and FIRO are hidden but is somehow stealth supported? Because of this I think it’s unlikely for CoinPayments to want to improve the integration.
While NowPayments is centralized in nature and there’s no guarantee it would not get delisted in the future, if the cost is not too high, it probably is the lowest barrier to entry and also has plugins for WooCommerce and things like that.
A lot of XMR accepting sites still use NowPayments and it goes to show that for most merchants, they just want an easy way to accept it along with other currencies as well. There’s of course the BTCPayserver plugin route which both Monero and Zcash support.
Self-Hosted Option
The self-hosted option would be for more tech-inclined or privacy conscious people. Monero and Zcash still rely heavily on BTCPayserver and their associated plugins and this would be the most obvious path though as far as I understand, being tied to BTCPayserver and the way it works has some limitations (though I need to find out more).
Digilol the company behind MoneroPay (which isn’t a fully fledged solution) is open to helping us develop a solution. They were actually halfway developing something called Metronero as an alternative to BTCPayserver plugin but they failed to get funding as most were happy to use the Monero btcpayserver plugin or NowPayments. They are also open to helping us develop a Nowpayments.io like solution but given that it’s centralized, the big question is who will run it and to add further difficulties, it will also not support other coins off the bat.
To me for the self hosted option, either we go for a BTCpayserver plugin for Firo or another open source solution like SHKeeper which we can see if they’re willing to do an integration or accept a contractor to do it for us. It also has support for various Wordpress, e-commerce plugins and they do accept multi-coins.
These are my thoughts so far, I’ll post more when more comes to mind.