In keeping with our core value of transparency, I’d like to shed some light on the overall strategy we’re pursuing at Verify.

While the competition are busy building crypto-payment solutions, we took a few weeks to validate some initial assumptions — so we can then build something we know our customers will use.

I’d like to share some of those findings in this post.

Does anyone even want crypto payments?

It’s such an obvious question, but most seem to take it as a given. “Build it and they will come”, they say.

To find out for ourselves, we spoke to both sides of the transaction.

Sellers

After speaking to over a hundred sellers, it became apparent that most sellers simply did not care about crypto for cryptos sake. There are two things they’re interested in: how much more money do I keep per transaction, and how many more customers do I get through crypto? The former is trivial to calculate, whereas the latter would require at least a small scale experiment.

Market research puts the size of the crypto-commerce market globally at $50m[1]. That’s pathetically small. Some may attribute this to the relatively early phase the crypto market is in, but consider the trajectory crypto is taking:

There are fewer merchants accepting cryptocurrencies today than a year ago.

Many companies that had previously accepted crypto are actually pulling out citing increase transaction fees and weak adoption. These are established companies like Expedia, Dell[2] and most recently Stripe — all deciding that Bitcoin just wasn’t worth accepting.

Buyers

Most crypto holders are holding for a reason: they expect the value of their coins to increase[3]. This alone should be proof enough that buyers have very little economic interest in parting with their coins for the sake of buying things. The buyers we spoke to reflected this sentiment — in the absence of a strong incentive to behave otherwise, buyers would not pay with crypto given the choice.

These findings make one thing pretty clear: it’s going to be an uphill challenge getting buyers and sellers to use crypto for payments[4]. Building a marketplace solution is tough enough — doing so while fighting established consumer behaviors is going to to be one hell of an undertaking.