When we set out to build Flexa, we knew that we had our work cut out for us. We knew that instant, retail cryptocurrency payments were possible, and we knew roughly what we needed to build in order to connect all of the important pieces together. But we truly had no idea just how meaningful Flexa would become for the very merchants we were building it for.

Over the past few decades, digital technologies have turned the world of commerce upside-down. Bitcoin and the blockchain have proven over and over again that private, secure, and censorship-resistant transactions are the future of value exchange. And yet—somehow—the way we pay for our daily purchases still hasn’t caught up to the present.

That’s why today, we couldn’t be more proud or excited to pull back the curtain on what the Flexa team has been building for the last fifteen months.

1. Bringing digital assets into real stores

Since February 2018, we’ve been hard at work building what we believe is the future of payments: Flexa is a new payments network, built on top of cryptocurrency, that brings buyers and sellers closer together in order to cut processing cost, eliminate fraud, and preserve your privacy. It’s what digital payments would look like if we designed them from the ground up.

We built Flexa because we believe that the existing payments infrastructure is broken. The typical cash alternatives—credit and debit cards—are expensive for merchants and prone to fraud. Even worse, each new card is less efficient than the last. [Who do you think pays for your credit card rewards? You do.]

So, instead of bolting cryptocurrency payments on top of debit cards, we took the opposite approach. Over the past year, we’ve built new connections with tens of thousands of merchant point-of-sale terminals nationwide, to bypass the existing payments infrastructure and push cryptocurrency-based payment authorizations directly to merchants on your behalf.

We call these payment authorizations “flexcodes,” and starting today, you can use them at some of the biggest and most forward-looking brands on the planet, each of whom were carefully curated to incorporate spending from every sector. We’re just getting started, and already you can spend your cryptocurrency on everything from apparel to entertainment and in between.

We couldn’t be more delighted to be working in such esteemed company, and we look forward to announcing even more incredible merchant partners on the Flexa network in the coming months.

2. Opening the network for business

Today, we’re excited to introduce the very first app on the Flexa network, which we’re calling SPEDN. We’ve built this new app for the millions of cryptocurrency holders who want to experiment with the future of payments, and we’re eager to see what you make of it.