AMA with DePay
On 4th January, PopcornMan community have conducted a public AMA with Sebastian Pape, the CEO of DePay to discuss how they can add value to the payment system in the Defi industry. For those who miss the AMA, here’s the recap for you.
Welcome & introduction
Gordon: Good evening everyone, we are pleased to have the CEO from DePay joining our AMA today.
PopcornManXYZ: hello everybody, thanks for joining us today!
let us welcome Sebastian!
Gordon: Before the AMA start, we will ask you some question for the introduction :)
These are the questions:
Q1 Before we start the AMA, can we have your short introduction of DePay and your team?
Q2 Can we know how you begin your crypto life and Start DePay?
Sebastian: So let’s start with me, my name is Sebastian, I am CEO of DePay, DePay is a decentralized payment processor.
We offer simple decentralized embeddable software (widgets) allowing anyone to easily integrate and perform decentralized crypto payments of any kind, converting it in real-time as part of the payment transaction to anything the receiver wants.
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 the 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.
Our team is located in Switzerland, to be precise in the so-called crypto valley, which spans from Zürich to Zug.
The core team consists of 3 founders from the three important sectors: Engineering, Online Marketing, and Finance.
All having more than 10+ years of profound experience in their respective field.
Check out our Linked page if you want to know more about our team: https://www.linkedin.com/company/depay/people
PopcornManXYZ: wow crypto valley!
Sebastian: To the second question…
I’ve started programming about 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 back from when I was a kid) to the blockchain and introduce digital real ownership to people owning those cards.
This finally got me into 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:
In 2020 I had a lot of exposure to DeFi and I’ve just connected the dots of what needs to be built next after the rise of liquidity pools and automated market makers (e.g. Uniswap etc.) and it was….
Decentralized Payment Processing
So I’ve joined Ethereums biggest yearly online event in October 2020 the ETHOnline Hackathon and became a finalist with DePay:
Twitter AMA segment begins
Q1: COVID 19 has slowed many economies around the world but the crypto business has affected you negatively or positively? Secondly, are you still on track to achieve your targets as the road map says?
If there is one good thing that COVID 19 brought us, it is that people and businesses started thinking more about digitalization, because they have been forced to do so, as everything was closed down.
I would say this affected us positively as people start looking more into digital payment processors, while that does not mean directly looking into crypto payment processors, but at least it’s the right direction.
We are still pretty much on track with our roadmap and rather tend to deliver sooner than later: https://depay.fi/blog/roadmap-to-2024-47T6cVdbEB0SQdG8pdWHsO
Q2: We can’t deny the fact that investors want a project which has a real-life use case. Does Depayfi solve any problems or gaps in real life aspects? What are the important use cases that are worth highlighting?
The crypto movement, which has been started by bitcoin, is all about getting rid of the man in the middle (formerly banks).
In payment processing, those middlemen were Visa + MasterCard.
It’s reasons like them just deciding about cutting big companies cashflow entirely for reasons which are not their business, like in Pornhub’s case: https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/10/22168240/mastercard-ending-pornhub-payment-processing-unlawful-videos
That makes people look for other solutions for payment processing like DePay, which is 100% decentralized.
Q3: By using an intermediary smart contract to make payments, this increases ETH’s network fee expenses, my question is, how do you plan to decrease the expenses that users must pay?
This is actually a very common misassumption, let me explain why.
Imagine you have 0.1 ETH in your wallet, enough to interact with the blockchain, not enough to pay a bill for $500 USD, but you also have some UNI tokens in your wallet that you could liquidate.
So instead of first going to an exchange, exchanging your UNI to ETH (1. transaction), then send the ETH to the seller (2. transaction) this will always cost more network fee’s because 2 transactions is always more expensive than 1 no matter if our intermediary payment processing smart contract adds a little bit of gas on top of that.
Besides that, we will also plugin common gas decreasing technologies into our payment processing smart contract like GAS tokens or CHI. So people will be enabled to reduce network fees by facilitating those gas optimization tokens while processing payments with us.
Q4: The most critical point that any payment gateway platforms related to crypto must affront are the legal issues, so can you speak about the regulatory terms that DepayFi handle?
Regulators can only regulate what’s regulatable. The best example is what happened to XRP, which could never happen to Ethereum, because Ethereum is in fact 100% decentralized, so regulators can not regulate it.
That said, DePay does not try to go against any rules or laws, it just means that we need to make sure with any step we perform in regards to decentralized payment processing, that it is in fact 100% decentralized, burning admin keys for smart contracts, handing over governance to token holders, etc., etc.
You can also take Uniswap as another example of how regulators have no grounds to regulate. Because of Uniswaps unique automated market maker approach, there is no custodian over orders (like you are used to on a centralized exchange), that’s why they don’t need any financial license, even though they are an exchange.
Besides that, there is always regulatory unsubstantiated scrutiny and gladly we are located in Switzerland, so we do not have to worry about that so much right now.
Q5: The DEPAY tokens are told to include VAT (value-added taxes) of 7,7%. Never seen similar in crypto — how does it work in the decentralized nature of cryptos? Are you regulated somehow or why is there a tax included in the price of a token?
First, kudos to the amount of attention required to catch this detail!
We are not an anonymous team. The tokens that we give into the market to fund further development of the DePay protocol and ecosystem are subject to swiss tax laws, don’t confuse that with regulations! As our payment processor, as well as our DEPAY tokens, are 100% decentralized and unregulatable.
A lot of people wrongly assume that when selling minted tokens tax laws do not apply to them, that’s wrong, also see: https://news.bitcoin.com/cryptocurrency-founder-years-prison-millions-dollars-exit-scam-without-paying-taxes/
So for the tokens that we give into the circulating supply, we (and we only) have to pay 7.7% value-added tax to the Swiss tax department because we are located in Switzerland.
Our users do not have to deal or pay Swiss value-added-tax, as this would be double-taxation otherwise, which is against any tax law of any country as far as I am concerned (NOT A TAX ADVISE).
As the DEPAY (utility & governance) token also unlocks our DePay PRO software, we offer SaaS (Software as a service) and instead of taking cash, our customers have to pay in DEPAY, as Swiss value-added-tax applies to pay for Saas, it’s no different to paying with DEPAY, we would be guilty of tax-evasion if we wouldn’t pay that to Swiss tax authorities, but again, that’s nothing that affects you or DEPAY token holders in general.
Gordon: Thank You! Before we start the live ama, do you have any latest news would like to share with our community?
Sebastian: We just released our refurbished website. It’s awesome. have a look https://depay.fi
Also, we are super busy to release v1 of our payment processor in January (which is still in beta right now)
Gordon: So lets us start the Live AMA session, channel will be unmuted for 1min
Live AMA begins
Q1: With people who don’t know about blockchain and cryptocurrency. How will you educate them about blockchain and cryptocurrency?
We don’t. It’s like the Internet. People use it, but they don’t understand it. We always have to remember that when we try to build awesome experiences with our product, always need to make it simple for everybody.
I often like to do the example with paying with your credit card in a foreign country, you don’t have any of the local currency, there is just this payment terminal that shows you the price of the good in your own currency, and you just pay.
That’s what we do, you just pay, and in our case with any crypto-asset of value.
Q2: What is the value and utility of the DEPAY token inside the DePay protocol? What opportunities do token holders have in the short and long term?
Outside of the protocol, DEPAY has utility value, you unlock DePay PRO with it, which is additional Software and tools that allow you to manage your crypto payments, imagine to send automatic bills to your customers after they have performed crypto payments to your stating the amount, the conversion the network fee, etc. this requires you to have DePay PRO, and you need to either stake DEPAY or pay in DEPAY in order to unlock it for you.
But the DEPAY token also has a governance part. The governance part of the DEPAY token allows the token holders to influence the protocol long term. While the team will not introduce payment processing fee’s initially the token holder governance could do so at some point in the future.
Q3: As I know, a competitive fee is crucial for the success of a #DeFi platform. So what are the fees when using the Depay product? Is your solution cheaper than other similar models?
Yeah, we take a 0% payment processing fee. We want to generate value and revenue through DePay PRO. We want to leave it up to the government to decide at some point to introduce payment processing fees.
Q4: How many wallets that can support $ DePay until now? And do you have any plan to build your own wallet?
Right now we mainly support web3, which is a standard to interact with the Ethereum blockchain, best example of a wallet implementing web3 is MetaMask, but also Imtoken wallet, coinbase wallet are implementing that standard, and DePay works in all those wallets that support that standard.
Q5: Do you have any Token Burn plans to increase the value of Token & attract Investors to invest? Can you tell me about your plan?
We have quite some token inflation control programs initiated, one of them is also token buyback and burn, but that one will not start before 2022.
But another token inflation control program called “Demand Insurance” for the utility part of the token makes sure that we burn all 5 Million tokens released in 2021 (according to the release schedule) if we end up with 0 DePay PRO customers at the end of the year 2021.
You can read more about our tokenomics in our blog: https://depay.fi/blog/tokenomics-update-v2-1eHIAcZo8KbGvvsBFg9KPL
Q6: As nowadays gas fees are so high, and planning to solve this issue?
Yes. First, we will experiment early on with Ethereum 2, mainly proof-of-stake will change the way we estimate gas costs before sending transactions, sharding (many ethereum chains) will also lead to reduced gas costs over the next 1–2 years.
Beside that, we will also experiment with Layer 2 solutions, allowing people that are onboarded with their assets to Layer 2, to use the exact same DePay Payment widget that works also for layer 1, so that for the seller, they integrate the same thing and it can serve all kinds of customers, no matter if their wallet is layer 1 or layer 2.
This will also allow us to reduce gas for people using DePay, besides the already mentioned implementation of gas reducing technologies like GAS token or CHI.
Q7: Is DEPAY fully decentralized?
Yes, it is. even the Widgets that people are gonna implement into their website will be hosted on IPFS (interplanetary file system/blockchain data storage), so even we ourselves will lose control over it.
Q8: I’m a developer, and I’m interested in contributing to DePay alongside earning, Do you have any Bug Bounty to check for vulnerabilities?
Yes. We recurringly post for example smart contract audits on https://gitcoin.co/ keep an eye open and you will sooner or later find opportunities to contribute on Gitcoin 😉
Q9: So many projects just like to speak about the “long term vision and mission” but what are your short terms objectives? What are you focusing on right now?
Our short-term objective is to create as much volume on our payment processor as possible. A lot of DePay projects are valued either by how much value they lock or how much value they process, so we focus on having as many people use DePay as a payment processor as possible.
Q10: Why did you prefer HQ in Zug? Do you have plans to collaborate in Europe?
It’s where the ethereum foundation is located. It’s a very attractive location to found a crypto company, especially because you do not have to fear regulatory scrutiny as much as in other countries.
Q11: Are there any venture capital or influencer that backed your project?
Yes. We can publicly share our advisory board which consists of VC and Influencers, here are 2 examples
Q12: I see there are not many members in the DePay community, do you have more marketing planning to expand the community and attract more investors?
Besides, I see your staking program really seems good investment, it should get more eyes attention!
Welcome to our marketing execution. You are experiencing it first hand 😛
Q13: How deeply will DEPAY be community-led? Can we by holding enough DEPAY tokens participate in the governance and vote on decisions regarding DePay in an autonomous and sustainable manner?
It will be 100% token holder led in the latest 3 years from now (similar to what Uniswap did).
Q14: What is the long term vision of DEPAY for its users?
Simple acceptance and execution of crypto/blockchain-based payments.
Q15: From the DePay roadmap, I see the roadmap to 2024, you guys are so well planning! Payment is one of the major development in 2021, can you tell us in simple how will the payment plugin to the retail systems and Shopify? as I guess if integrate with Shopify is very important to move for DePay
I didn't see any major project partnership with DePay, any hint to us that DePay will announce soon?
Uniswap is one of the trends now, how important you think about listing on Uniswap &liquidity for DePay?
Although the APR is high to stake $DEPAY, how do you make the community have trust to stake for rewards in long term?
Yes, we will release plugins to all major shopping providers like Shopify etc.
The community has trust in us it’s experiencing progress live every day, every week.
Besides that, we are not an anonymous project, and with our media coverage, we establish quite a standing in the scene already.
-End-
