Don’t buy crypto, earn it! The easiest way for freelancers, influencers, owners of small businesses and rental experiences to start accepting crypto for their work and monitor payments.

With 35% of the US workforce working as freelancers and the global gig economy ballooning to over $4.5 trillion per year, the chances are that you either are or know people who have embraced this increasingly popular way of working. On top of this, there are also 582 million entrepreneurs in the world, with most of them running small businesses.

If you work as a freelancer, artist, own a small business or rent a vacation retreat and are open to the idea of widening your client base (or just want a stake in crypto’s future), then we have an easy solution to get you started on your crypto journey.

What is Cryptopayment.link?

In a nutshell, we feel Cryptopayment.link is the world’s simplest crypto payment request and payment monitoring tool. It’s been built by Team Nimiq to make it easy for people to earn crypto--instead of buying it--by selling their service, product or other offering!

Cryptopayment.link does this by making it quick and easy to create/send Bitcoin, Ethereum and NIM payment requests to your client via a single unique link, whilst automating the amount quoted to the client in crypto to match the amount you enter in USD/Euro. The solution also offers a handy blockchain monitoring tool that sends you an email notification as soon as you have been paid.

What’s even better is that Cryptopayment.link does all this with no annoying installations or plugins. This completely free service offered by Nimiq is also entirely non-custodial, which means that payments are made directly from a client’s crypto wallet to yours without the use of a middleman (who usually charges fees).

Cryptopayment.link also helps by pointing crypto newcomers in the right direction to create a Bitcoin, Ethereum or NIM wallet and saves your crypto payment addresses within your web browser to quickly initiate new payment requests.

When To Use Cryptopayment.link

This simple tool allows newcomers to crypto to easily accumulate their first bit of crypto, become stakeholders in the wider ecosystem and experience the advantages of holding cryptocurrency. By selling a good or service using this tool, you can bypass the obstacles of buying crypto on an exchange (with the need to submit personal information, connect bank accounts, etc). This tool does not intend to entirely replace how you receive your income, but by supplementing even 1 in 20 payments in crypto, you gain the advantages of diversifying your assets.

Some examples of businesses this tool would be ideal for:

Vacation rentals, retreats or experience packages

Classes or instructions

Artwork, commission work, photography, videography

Freelance work in general (coding, content writing, marketing, development, design, data entry, accountancy services, etc)

A shift in working patterns can be seen in the astonishing revenue growth of freelance platforms like UpWork, which is a marketplace that matches freelancers with business owners and recently reported annual revenues of over $1.7 billion. The potential to save on fees is especially relevant when serving international clients. The cost to process an international bank transfer can be as high as $50. PayPal email invoicing costs 2.9% + a small additional flat fee for every transaction. As any freelancer or individual business owner will tell you, someone ultimately ends up paying these fees and ends up with less money in their pocket. Though crypto prices can fluctuate, this can be offset by the relatively low crypto transaction costs (below 40 cents and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin can typically be converted to local currency at a cost of 1% or less). If the person receiving payment in crypto wants to minimise the short-term volatility risk, their option is to convert their crypto into local currency quickly after receiving it.

Many freelancers, individual business owners, and influencers already have a solid knowledge of the standard tools used to operate internationally. It is likely they have also heard about cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and how the innovative tech emerging from this space could be groundbreaking. What the Cryptopayment.link tool offers is an easy way to get some skin in the cryptocurrency markets. If crypto has the bright future we all believe it has, then this could turn out to be a very wise choice indeed.

Finally, there are some counterparties that look for opportunities to make payments in crypto just because they already have a solid stake, want to support the system or again want to save on the cost of transaction. Not accepting crypto as a payment method carries the risk of effectively shutting the door on these potential clients. Cryptopayment.link offers an easy way to expand your potential client base by making it easy to accept and track crypto payments.

Cryptopayment.link & Zopilote: The First Steps To Real-World Adoption

Zopilote is a surf camp on the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica. The owner of the business believes that crypto could be a big thing in the future and wanted an easy way to accumulate some crypto in exchange for his surf camp retreats. Naturally, Team Nimiq went out to Zopilote to talk to them and show them how Cryptopayment.link could be the tool they were looking for.

By the end of the meeting, they had learned how to use Cryptopayment.link and were excited to use the tool for Zopilote vacation packages and rentals. We’d like to thank Zopilote for the insightful feedback given in the meeting and making Zopilote the first real-world adopter of Cryptopayment.link.

How To Get Started?

If you are open to accepting your first crypto payment with Cryptopayment.link, all you need to do is to simply add a payment note and enter the amount of USD or Euros you want to charge your client.

Next, just enter your brand name and email address to enable Cryptopayment.link to send an email notification to you once your client has paid. This is made possible by Cryptopayment.link monitoring the Bitcoin, Ethereum and Nimiq blockchains for you. Share your Cryptopayment.link with your counterparty via email, chat or messenger and once the service spots that your crypto payment has been confirmed on the respective blockchain, you (as well as the paying counterparty) will get a payment confirmation email.

And for all you crypto veterans out there, you’ll know how much of a hassle and distraction it can be to keep checking if a payment has been received. Cryptopayment.link takes care of all that for you, so you can focus more time on your business and keeping clients happy.

Now, you’ll be asked to enter your Bitcoin, Ethereum or NIM address if you have one or you can click the question mark icon next to the cryptocurrency you want to use and be taken to Cryptopayment.link’s recommended wallet for that crypto.

The smart thing about Cryptopayment.link is that, because it’s browser-based, the cryptocurrency addresses will be saved within your browser for you. That means that it’s a whole lot quicker to send crypto payment requests the second time around.

Finally, click ‘create link’ and you’ll then see a crypto payment link that you can send to your client using email or messaging apps like Skype, WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook Messenger.

Alternatively, you can insert crypto payment links into invoices using popular accounting software like Xero.

What Happens After You Have Generated A Payment Link?

For starters, you’ll get a confirmation email telling you that your payment link has been successfully created. Once your client has paid your crypto payment link, you’ll then get a handy email notification telling you that you’ve been paid.

Crypto Made Easy

Nimiq has always had the objective of making crypto easy. Team Nimiq believes it has identified a massive potential market of people for whom accumulating their first crypto is beginning to make sense. It can be challenging to set up exchange accounts, jump through KYC hoops and connect a bank account just to buy your first crypto. Setting up crypto wallets, making a payment request in Crypto, invoicing the correct amount and monitoring if the payment has been made, can also be overwhelming. Cryptopayment.link solves these pain points whilst also featuring NIM prominently to help raise awareness about Nimiq, which can then be leveraged to help cross-sell users to NIM in the future.

According to the stats, chances are that you know a small business owner or freelancer. Maybe even some who have an interest in crypto and want to diversify by accepting it! We would encourage you to share this service with anyone you think could benefit from it. We’d greatly appreciate any feedback and you doing your bit for crypto adoption 😉!

We hope you are as excited as we are for 2020.

Pura Vida,

Team Nimiq