Here’s our 35th AMA recap!
Thank you to the Infinity Chain Club for participating in Ask Me Anything (AMA) with DePay on January 8, 2021. This guest star,
Sebastian Pape — CEO of DePay
Introduction
Sebastian | DePay,
My name is Sebastian, I am CEO of DePay, a decentralized payment processor.
I’ve started programming like 20 years ago (in my teens), and until today I don’t understand why I’ve joined the crypto and blockchain space so late. It just never reached me, I guess.
In 2018 I was reading an online article about Gods Unchained and how they attempt to do what Magic the Gathering (a very known trading card game) to the blockchain and introduce digital real ownership to people owning those cards.
This finally got me into the space and that’s also where I started building on ethereum. In 2018 I’ve built a blockchain explorer and NFT exchange for Gods Unchained, still one of the most successful games on Ethereum:
https://www.blocknative.com/blog/gu-cards
In 2020 I had a lot of exposure to DeFi and I’ve just connected the dots of what needs to be build next after the rise of liquidity pools and auto mated market makers (e.g. Uniswap etc.) and it was decentralized payment processing.
I’ve joined Ethereums biggest yearly online event in October 2020 and became finalist with DePay:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2140&v=n8M_GwbKKWs&feature=emb_logo
Since then, things are quite busy for me and the team 😆
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Q1. Starting with the very basics, can you explain us about DEPAY and your idea build DEPAY? What problems are you intended to solve with DEPAY?
Sebastian | DePay,
Current payment processing within the decentralized web is rudimentary and inefficient.
Users are often forced to exchange their cryptocurrencies and tokens on third-party exchanges before they’re able to make payments.
On those exchanges users are faced with complicated signup procedures or are required to have a minimal level of technical understanding.
This creates unnecessary effort and higher transaction costs that ultimately need to be absorbed by the user.
Existing payment solutions don’t take advantage of the fact that users might already have tokens or cryptocurrencies of value at their disposal and that those assets can be exchanged in realtime as part of the payment transaction.
DePay aims to make it easier for everybody to accept and perform crypto payments through the implementation of efficient and simple-to-use decentralized payment solutions, developing new products and services that create a positive and lasting impact on the industry.
The DePay payment protocol works with all exchangeable asset classes contained within a user’s crypto wallet. With its implementation we increase the amount of available cryptocurrencies and tokens eligible for payment by more than hundredfold.
By facilitating current and future decentralized exchanges, DePay always ensures the most cost-effective way to perform payments.
This is achieved by routing payments through the least costly exchange in real-time while the payment process is being performed.
Let me make a quick example:
Seller wants to receive 100 USDT for a product, adds DePay Payments to his website, Customer comes and wants to buy product, has only 0.05 ETH and 400 UNI in his wallet, DePay Payments scans his wallet, finds UNI suggests to pay in UNI. Converts UNI to USDT and sends the requested USDT to the seller, all in one transaction.
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Q2. Can you tell us about the advantages of DEPAY, how is DEPAY better than other platforms? What makes it unique compared to competitors?
Sebastian | DePay,
We are the first, that have built payment processing on top of DeFi.
That’s also why most of our competitiors are custodial, centralized payment processors, because in the recent past, it was simply not possible to enable any-to-anything payments without latest liqudity pool protocols like Uniswap, Balancer, or Curve etc.
Beside that, our wallet scan and on-chain routing to identify the most cost-effective token to perform a crypto payment is outstanding and no other competitors has this yet.
If you want to know more about how we compare to the competition, we’ve published an extensive article on our blog: https://depay.fi/blog/market-overview-and-competitive-analysis-oXUx2EwStTkWK4cceGaoG
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Q3. Now talking about your Tokenomics Can you give us an overview on DEPAY Tokenomics and please explain is utility? How should investors benefits by holding DEPAY token?
Sebastian | DePay,
The DEPAY token powers and unlocks the overall DePay PRO ecosystem, with utilities across various payment processing products and services.
Think of having a business accepting crypto payments with DePay Payment…
and now they want to have DePay PRO sent or display a bill to the customer including ethereum fees and details about the payment, this would be a DePay PRO feature and the businesses would either stake or pay DEPAY tokens for that.
but the DEPAY token unlock way more than that from a utility perspective.
We expect, the more features we add to DePay PRO the more valuable the DEPAY token becomes as the amount of DEPAY users have to pay for DePay PRO will stay the same.
But the DEPAY token does not only have a utility part, it also has a governance part.
Whilst the initial demand driver for DEPAY tokens will be utility, the governance aspect, and the features that this can unfold will become more prominent over time.
We believe that the future of the decentralized web will contain only protocols that are autonomous, censorship resistant, publicly owned, and thus truly decentralized.
DEPAY holders will have ownership of:
• DePay protocol governance
• DePay basic products
• The DEPAY governance treasury
• The protocol fee switch
DEPAY holders will have the right to:
• Submit feature requests and prioritize and reprioritize milestones and objectives
• Initiate governance proposals
DEPAY holders will have the responsibility of:
• Ensuring that the protocol and basic products stay decentralized
This means: Once we handed over the payment processing protocols, the governance (token holders) could decide to introduce %-processing fee for every payment going through the decentralized processor.
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Q4. Security is what a investor priotize so can you explain tell us about DEPAY security measures and are your smart contract audited ?
Sebastian | DePay,
DePay’s basic products are decentralized which comes with the common security benefits of prevention of fraud and regulatory intervention.
Beyond that, all our smart contracts are reviewed and audited from at least 3 different external auditors to make sure they are safe and secure.
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Q5. Can you give us an overview on your roadmap and what are the milestones achieved. What are your long term plans ?
Sebastian | DePay,
Actually DEPAY token staking you can tick-off too, ✅, as we have just released that in December. It’s an opportunity for for early token holders to earn up to 90% DEPAY on their DEPAY/ETH if staked as liquidity.
Learn more about our staking program here: https://depay.fi/blog/stake-and-earn-2H7Zx9gNh0VgqnlHAyJubs
Beside that the first milestone this year is to release our DePay Payment in version 1.0 (currently beta).
After that we want to release the first basic versions of all products of our entire product lineup (https://depay.fi/blog/roadmap-to-2024-47T6cVdbEB0SQdG8pdWHsO)
Long-term, decentralized, inter-blockchain payment processing is on our roadmap, just as growing the entire DePay PRO ecosystem, the main utility demand driver of the DEPAY token as well as handing over the basic payment protocols to the public and the DEPAY token governance.
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TWITTER QUESTIONS
Q1.The DePay logo catches my attention. It looks very similar to the representation of an atom. What exactly does it symbolize and who was in charge of designing it? Is there a story behind it?
Thank you!
Sebastian | DePay,
Our DePay Logo actually represents a spinning coin. The idea is to represent the fact that we exchange any coin to any coin while performing a payment in real time, like flipping UNI to DAI while performing a payment.
And our mascot PayPay just got a pair of arms and legs attached to it, but represents the same thing, just cuter.
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Q2. DEPAY short term goal is to create as much volume on our payment processor as possible.
Then what is the long-term vision of DEPAY for its users?
Sebastian | DePay,
Short-term, for a DeFi project it’s important to either lock-in a lot of value (like AAVE) or transact a lot of value (like 1inch exchange).
For us as a payment processor, it’s important to transact a lot of value (have a lot of payments procesed)
As people will correlate that with how much DEPAY is worth, similiar to other DeFi tokens.
As mentioned in the introduction already, long-term it’s important to grow the entire DePay PRO ecosystem to guarante a constant growing demand for the DEPAY token from a utility perspective, but also to ensure our basic protocols stay 100% decentralized by handing over all protocols and smart contracts to the public and DEPAY token holder governance.
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Q3.What are the cryptocurrencies available in DePay to be used as a payment method?
Sebastian | DePay,
Every cryptocurrency …
that has a pair on a decentralized exchange (like Uniswap) or a pair on a liquidity protocol (like Curve) can be used as a means of payment, if paying with DePay.
While inter-blockchain payments (like BTC > ETH) payments are not 100% doable yet (from a decentralized perspective), it’s just a matter of 1–2 years until inter-blockchains (like polkadot etc.) are mature enough so that we can use them to also allow e.g. BTC > ETH payments in a 100% decentralized way.
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Q4. DePay Credit is not yet available. My question is, what structure will you build to make this credit platform the best in the market? Will there be any requirements to be met in order to acquire these credits? Will you dedicate this DeFi model to all users or only to companies?
Sebastian | DePay,
DePay Credit (loan) will be based on our payment stream protocols DePay Subscription and DePay Payroll.
DePay Subscription and DePay Payroll can be further considered as a future guarantee or form of collateral.
With this in mind, DePay plans to facilitate the tokenization of consumers’ and businesses’ existing payment streams.
This will allow users to borrow funds or other crypto assets by using these tokenized payment streams as collateral.
The loans are effectively guaranteed by future payroll earnings and subscription income as defined within the relevant smart contracts.
Once the loans have been fully redeemed, the original payment stream terms will once again come into effect.
The interest rates will be defined by the market we will build around those tokenized future colleterals.
Read more about our technology on our blog: https://depay.fi/blog/technology-overview-5vBNZKWm9IxhmrLNdyWudZ
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Q5. How is DEPAY an alternative to modern payment methods? when there are many countries that do not accept cryptos as a payment method?
Sebastian | DePay,
DePay is 100% decentralized means that people perform payments peer-to-peer. While some countries do believe they could regulate blockchains like Ethereum, some of them finally found out, they in fact, cannot.
If businesses want to stay compliant with their country laws, I guess they shouldn’t use DePay to accept payments in those countries to not break the laws, but just as the blockchain and crypto movement as a whole…
we also believe that money and value transfer should be free of regulatory intervention…
hence, even if you are in a country that does not allow crypto payments, you could still use DePay, technically. NOT an advise!
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TELEGRAM QUESTIONS
Q1. @stargateeatlantis
Too many projects promise magic but never release any working product or prove any revenue. What makes your project different from other projects?
Sebastian | DePay,
The first thing we did was actually built a product. The product is what we have delivered at the ETHOnline Hackathon 2020. Our product has been judged by the most influencial people in Ethereum, not our idea. That makes us standout entirely compared to other projects.
https://hack.ethglobal.co/showcase/depay-recNEUpmNxurdbAFB
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Q2. @zetly11
You said you create embedable software for developers so which programming language do you use and the developer has to know?
Sebastian | DePay,
We use state of the art frameworks and language to built the DePay widgets and expirences, including Solidity and React.
People that use DePay do not have to know any programming language at all, as we try to make it very simple to integrate. You just need to copy&paste a small snippet into your website or Dapp, or if you run a shop, you will just need to enable our plugin (e.g. Shopify) to enable crypto payments via DePay.
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Q3. @Ama_professor
DePay recently just formed a strategic partnership with Nerd Finance which I believe will move both project forward. Can you please give a sneek peak of what both project are working on and the problems it will create solution to?
Sebastian | DePay,
When you visit n3rd finance you can see that they require you to have either ETH or USDT in order to stake in their yield farms.
We will work with n3rd to make our payment processor being able to accept smart contracts as payment receiver, means n3rd finance will be able to have people stake in their yield farms no matter what their users have in their wallets, instead of currently forcing them to exchange tokens to ETH or USDT in order to stake on n3rd finance.
it’s one of many example how we enable a lot of Dapps and websites out there to improve the expirience for their users.
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Q4. @Eliasbb
I read that there will be 0% payment processing fee. If 0% fee than how DEPAY generate revenue for itself?
Sebastian | DePay,
With DePay PRO. We don’t want to force payment processing fees on others, especially as we believe DePay PRO will generate enough demand for the token. That said, just because we will not introduce payment processing fees initially, does not mean that down the line, the governance at some point will introduce it.
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Q5. @Astonroe
Truely 100% decentralized? Or there is some risk of Centralization?
Sebastian | DePay,
Currently our basic products, like accepting payments with DePay Payments is 100% decentralized, even the widgets themselves are hosted on IPFS (decentralized file storage).
DePay PRO on the other hand, can’t be built decentralized and will always stay centralized, e.g. you cant sent emails via the blockchain (yet).
But this has no effect on the basic products and protocols to always stay 100% decentralized.
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- Telegram : http://t.me/depayfi
- Twitter : https://twitter.com/DePayFi
- Website : https://depay.fi
- Whitepaper : https://depay.fi/whitepaper.pdf
- Reddit : https://www.reddit.com/r/DePayFi
- Medium : https://medium.com/@DePay
- Discord : https://discord.gg/smDs5zK
- Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/company/DePay
- Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/DePayFi
- Youtube : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6rwOM5B7CSF7Bv7JKJg5xA
Thank you for trusting Infinity Chain Club as the organizer of the event today, hopefully everyone can understand about DePay.
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