from Hacker News

An embeddable and customizable fiat-to-crypto onramp

by dayve on 12/1/22, 5:57 PM with 232 comments

• by paxys on 12/1/22, 6:52 PM

  Users seamlessly buy crypto with USD and spend it.

  Merchants seamlessly convert crypto back to USD and cash it out.

  So what is the point of crypto again other than giving Stripe (and similar centralized providers) a needless cut?

• by TeMPOraL on 12/2/22, 2:52 AM

  Speaking of ramps, what about crypto-to-fiat offramp?

  My brief experience with crypto involved the couple hundred bucks in Stellar/Lumen/whatever-its-called that the peddlers of that crypto coin gave for free to established Keybase users a while ago. I spent many hours trying to figure out how to convert them into real money without giving my government ID to some sketchy crypto companies, to no avail.

  Yes, I know, KYC. But still, what struck me as interesting is, there is tons of first and third-party guides and articles on everything you can do with those Stellar/Lumen coins, except the one thing that I'd think most unwilling recipients are interested in: how to cash it out and forget about it. It's like this part of the crypto space (and I suspect most of the entire ecosystem, really) is heavily biased towards ingesting money. It feels like videogame virtual money you can buy, but not sell.

• by Animats on 12/1/22, 7:08 PM

  This might have been a viable product in 2019. Today. no.

  Usually, you can't buy money with a credit card. That's a personal loan, and has higher rates. None of the major US banks allow buying crypto with a credit card.[1] Debit cards, yes.

  [1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/credit-cards/buy-crypto-with-...

• by jongjong on 12/1/22, 10:05 PM

  This is great news. It's great that Stripe is willing to support decentralization, especially in the current environment. Fiat-to-crypto on-boarding has been a major pain point due to regulations. It has deprived an entire generation of opportunities to launch crypto-based businesses outside of the corporate and private equity sphere.

• by sli on 12/2/22, 2:06 AM

  Looking forward to this quietly being discontinued in a couple months when Stripe realizes a lot of the activity is just hype and not actual people.

• by Thorentis on 12/2/22, 9:15 AM

  > Blockchains provide developers with extraordinarily powerful capabilities...

  Does anybody take statements like this seriously any more? I realise if you're spruiking a crypto product you need to have at least drunk some of the koolaid, but are we still pretending that blockchains are actually useful constructs?

• by raiyu on 12/1/22, 6:29 PM

  This is great, one of the annoying bits of doing anything in Crypto has been buying Crypto in the first place, this certainly makes the whole process easier. And since Stripe is handling the KYC portion it reduces the complexity tremendously on anyone building and Stripe is a trusted party so great on all accounts.

  Now ... if there was just a killer app that was actually useful ;)

• by jjtheblunt on 12/1/22, 6:30 PM

  What would someone use this for, when fiat works everywhere?

• by reidjs on 12/1/22, 6:36 PM

  Unclear if this is in production or if they are just seeing if it’s viable to build, but it would be awesome if this works! I signed up for the release.

• by csomar on 12/2/22, 1:56 AM

  This is crap. Countries not supported? KYC? Registration? How is this supporting decentralization? This seems like an overly complex payment flow just to get us to where we started from.

  This is just Stripe trying to get on the NFT bandwagon (too late by the way). They'll probably close this service in 2 years.

• by skybrian on 12/1/22, 10:37 PM

  It would be interesting to know how Stripe sets exchange rates. They act as an exchange for many traditional currencies and now for cryptocurrencies, in both directions.

  To some extent they should be able to do this internally, when cash flows balance out.

• by ilaksh on 12/1/22, 10:08 PM

  The onboarding is only for Ethereum or Ethereum-based stablecoins?

• by seydor on 12/1/22, 9:05 PM

  The only such onramp i could trust would be localbitcoins or sth. Anything that involves online seems to be hacked and is spied by 100 different agencies. A bit too much when all you want to buy is vitamins.

• by katabora on 12/1/22, 6:49 PM

  Impeccable timing

• by Gordonjcp on 12/2/22, 9:08 AM

  How exactly are cryptocurrencies not fiat? They're not backed by anything.

• by malthaus on 12/1/22, 6:33 PM

  Given that the house of cards finally comes crashing down, a crypto-to-fiat offramp to get your money into safety would actually be more helpful.

  "Overall, we maintain fundamental optimism about how crypto can help to facilitate a more globally accessible financial services ecosystem."

  Sure; either that or the tasty 5% fee from the example flow?

• by brainchild-adam on 12/1/22, 6:56 PM

  I am both fascinated and confused by crypto currencies.

  The idea of a free-as-in-freedom, flexible, secure, and more democratic and independent payment system seems quite attractive.

  At the same time I seem to see mainly examples of high-to-extreme volatility, fraud, technical and regulatory exclusion and suppression, and a total lack of real-world practicality.

  I am quite sure my view is skewed.

  If you have used crypto currencies in real life, ideally for more than speculative investment, would you be willing to share (parts of) the experience? I'd be very curious to learn more about this part of the puzzle of crypto.

  How did you acquire crypto? What did you use it for? How did you feel about the transaction? Would you do it again?

  Or anything else you'd like to share for that matter.

• by rahen on 12/1/22, 6:42 PM

  It's KYC. Thanks but no thanks, I'll keep using DEXes...

• by voz_ on 12/1/22, 7:02 PM

  Might as well add fiat-to-pork-belly-futures, when there's no real world use for crypto, its just a tradable commodity without the real world application of commodity goods.

• by phlipski on 12/1/22, 6:55 PM

  An embeddable and customizable fiat-to-ponzi onramp. Fixed the title!