I am a little jealous of Americans who can use ZODL as a real-life payment option with that Flexa integration. My mobile OS of choice is GrapheneOS, and one of the very few downsides is the lack of Google Pay. It would be nice to use ZODL instead. Is there a Flexa alternative for the European market that ZODL could integrate with?
Zcash was made to be used, but outside of web services that accept crypto, there is little opportunity. Of course, that is already a huge improvement to how it was before the NEAR integration, but realistically this still covers only a small portion of everyday purchases. How many payments are renewing a Nym VPN subscription or buying credits on OpenRouter? They certainly don’t compare to rent, groceries or restaurant bills. Flexa and NEAR showed the way to do it: piggyback on someone else’s existing network effect.
To quote Justin Kan:
First time founders are obsessed with product.
Second time founders are obsessed with distribution.
To clarify my original point: I am super happy with how useful ZODL has already become. It is amazing that I can go to a web service that accepts whatever crypto token and pay using ZEC (like I mentioned with OpenRouter).
Of course, the end goal is shops supporting ZEC directly, but they will only do so in large numbers once there is a large user base; which will only come into being with real use cases. To break out of this chicken-and-egg situation, we need to piggyback on existing network effects. The ZODL team did amazing work doing exactly that with NEAR and Flexa.
I brought this up because I see very little discussion on this forum about where else we could get such wins (like a hypothetical European equivalent to Flexa), even though I believe these questions are of utmost importance.
Great points, and I agree with your perspective. With Nozywallet, my approach is to explain that users will need to subscribe to NYM in order to access the web browser feature within Nozywallet.
I hadn’t heard of this service before you mentioned it. From looking at their website, Bitrefill allows users to buy virtual gift cards for a whole bunch of shops without KYC or even an account being required. One major downside is that many shops don’t allow gift cards for custom amounts. While this is a solution to my wish for a real-life payment option, it is not quite the tap to pay UX that I imagined. Nevertheless, I am sure there are real use cases for this.
