Bitcoin’s original promise of “peer-to-peer electronic cash” has not precisely evolved in the way Satoshi intended. More people than ever are eager to pay in crypto, while most suppliers only want Fiat.
While the discrepancy has plenty of solutions in countries with a strong banking and credit card culture, it is a real problem in places with alternative electronic payment rails, such as QR codes, says Pseudonym Crypto developer Sheldon Cooper. How to scan a Fiat-Kun Code and pay in stableecoins?
Cooper’s claimed solution, p2p.me, does so without ever touching the regular on-and-off ramps. Instead, this blockchain-based service depends on a network of middlemen who are willing to accept USDC from, for example, Alice and send the equivalent Fiat to Bob. The whole process takes about 90 seconds, he said.
There is also no traditional identity control. P2P.Me veterinarians with zero-knowledge evidence that controls for a real-supervised presence on social media and maybe even for a government ID. But it does not store this personal data that most financial institutions would from banks down to Binance.
“What we were thinking about is, ‘How do we decentralize this? How do we do it to and from Rams in a decentralized way,’ said Cooper.” The main concern is privacy and self -preserving. All of these Cexes provide data to the government. ”
P2P.Me’s quirky mix of permissionless markets and privacy technology has dealt with $ 1.6 million in payments from about 1,100 users, mostly in Indonesia, Nigeria and Vietnam. The modest amount that grew rapidly was enough to gain the interest of venture capitalists: Multicoin Capital and Coinbase Ventures recently invested $ 2 million p2p.me’s round.
The money has already helped P2P.Me scale its team for 20 people in front of a planned push in Latin America, Cooper said. He sees communities struggling to navigate established financial rails as key advertisers. It is also crypto-savvy tourists who go places where their credit card does not work, but their mobile phones do.
Built on the base, the open protocol plans to launch a token in the next 12 months that will change control to the community, according to Cooper.
“The strategic idea of the token is to scale globally, to break the network effects of the centralized exchange with P2P,” he said.
