Crypto Payments Still Suck
If you’ve ever observed a crypto UX researcher at work interviewing customers, you wonder how it is that trillions of dollars ever made it through crypto rails.
I’ve been working for nearly a decade in the space. Some of these facts may shock you:
- I have yet to encounter a single Normie that quickly grasps what crypto addresses are for.
- I still encourage EVERYONE to make a small test payment and see it arrive before sending crypto to a new counterparty. Yet, I always get a mini heart attack after the payment has been sent but before the recipient “acknowledges’’ it.
- To my reading, the deposit screens of the top exchanges have not significantly changed since their launch (beyond putting the same info in modals or flyouts).
Making Progress as an Industry
As an industry, we have made significant progress, though. The proliferation of protocols like Ethereum Provider and Wallet Connect has given payments a great UX without compromising security. I was pleasantly surprised to see Bitpay’s new checkout screen that leverages these protocols.
I had the privilege of spending a whole day with the founders of these protocols in the most recent Chain Agnostic meeting in Berlin. The ball is moving forward at increasing speed. It has to. The prior art simply does not scale for multichain.
In August, we introduced an Open Source Cross Chain Assets Metadata index and verification protocol. We made it freely available on assets.map3.xyz and published an open-source API to make it easy to consume. Since then, 11,431 assets across 27 networks have been indexed.
Today, we are introducing our Open Source Payments SDK.
About the SDK
The Payments SDK (Supercharge) leverages the cross-chain metadata index to make it easy to accept payments directly from the top ~250 self-custody Wallets. It is built on top of the top payment protocols in Crypto, including Wallet Connect, Ethereum Provider, Wallet Link and others.
It is stunningly beautiful and can be embedded with a few lines of code on Web and Mobile contexts. It supports light and dark mode themes, with customization coming soon. It is built to be modular, so you can use the parts of it that you need. Finally, it is chain agnostic and is built to work across 99% of crypto assets by market cap.
Our hope is that Supercharge becomes a no-brainer option for those building in Crypto, whether it is a custodial or non-custodial application.
You can play with it at https://map3.xyz/supercharge, spin it up on Codesandbox or pull it directly from GitHub!
Join the Alpha
We are looking for crypto builders that can help us understand the challenges they would face by integrating the SDK.
Supercharge is soon to launch in Alpha. You have the opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to open crypto infrastructure.
Please register your interest here: https://cal.com/amadeo-map3/discovery
Our vision is to make crypto interoperability accessible to every developer. Open Sourcing the Payments SDK gets us a step closer to it.