Sid Gandhi 🎾
@sidgandhi_xyz
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real world stablecoin payments with privacy • building @payy_link • prev pm @cruise, eng @apple
Manhattan, NY
Joined March 2011
we asked 326 people about stablecoins use, across 6 countries. we stepped into their shoes, talked about their families and daily lives. how they actually use USDT, USDC, exchanges and crypto cards. here's what we found 🧵
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I can’t keep it in any longer. I’m spilling the beans on our mega launch at ETH Denver. We’ve been working two years to build the best payments experience you’ve ever seen. It’s called Payy, and here are some unexpected features:. - Global on day 1. Every country. Every person.
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i spent 2 months researching fiat<>crypto ramps. here are the top 7 challenges. 1 — limited coverage. - each country has different regulations, so ramps focus on certain regions.- to get global coverage, you need multiple ramps.- ops for multiple ramps is hard and bad UX.
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zk compliance brain dump:. the goal of regulators is to make sure people are following rules. let’s define the rules as a function f(x). where x is the data and actions you have taken in a system. what regulators do today is gather data, and run it through f to find out if you’re.
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finally, debanking is getting a mainstream narrative. for the last year we’ve been building the first onchain bank at @payy_link . everything that jp morgan chase does, but on the blockchain. saving, spending, lending and borrowing. all self-custody, controlled only by you. in
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ridiculous. retail investors can't sell their tiny allocation bc of a $50 on most platforms. locked in by cap gains tax + $50 exceeding profits
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love that paypal and venmo integrated ens. now you can see your ex-gf's payments to her new bf's ens.
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@0xMert_ i hope this is a joke. so solana's just been crossing fingers and hoping node providers don't spam. did everyone forget what an adversarial environment means.
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okay i promised more details on @payy_link, so here goes. 1. the tech we built is insane: . - 1s utxo zk proof on mobile (handwritten HALO2 circuits) .- in-house zk rollup + bridge (Polygon now, eth soon) .- in-house zk-enabled consensus (Solid) .- react native zk bindings.
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crypto will soon have a cambridge analytica moment. consumers will realize all their blockchain transactions are public, forever. with blockchain analysis firms signing contracts with governments around the world, consumers will hate it more than social data being leaked.
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@0xMert_ jokes aside. agree, bugs happen. but an economic system with 4b+ value. and no integration tests that simulate network spam and adversarial environments. that's a tough sell.
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@chadfowler Unless you didn't stop them to give them an idea of your level of technical proficiency. Then it's probably your fault. Because they had to start somewhere, and they started where they were most comfortable.
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Payy is focused on solving social privacy, not absolute privacy. While we wish absolute privacy could work at scale, it simply can't because governments need to do their job of protecting people from bad actors. Social privacy means that your net worth and activity are not.
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@lstephanian extremely useful analysis, 2023 had some major shifts and it feels like 24 will continue down that path.
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progressive decentralization is. progressing.
1/.Payy with @CelestiaOrg underneath ✨. we’re upgrading Payy Network to scale with @CelestiaOrg as a permissionless, high-throughput data availability layer.
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65% of people don’t have a crypto card, but want one. this desire is led by Nigeria where 75% of respondents said they want a crypto card.
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over 30% of people have used stablecoins for either paying for services, friends and family. 21% have bought goods and 25% get paid in stables.
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in Argentina, 35% have more than a quarter of their net worth in stables. 20% have more than half.
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the team at @polybase_xyz was struggling with comparing different ZK frameworks. so we made a benchmarks website with tons of info on tradeoffs and nuances:. we also had fun making this gif
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@levelsio Have relied on Apple password manager mostly for the last 2 years and it been amazing . No third party to trust, full is integration and iCloud sync. Just a few quirks and hidden ui things you need to find.
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this research is in service of building the best stablecoin bank in the world with @payy_link. Thank you to our team, esp @calummoore for leading the efforts here. over the next few months, we will triple our sample size and add more countries and diversity. reply on the first.
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next week we're going to drop data on 300+ user interviews we've done for @payy_link across 6 countries. if you care about real world crypto payments, cross border, onramping, stablecoin usage you're going to love it.
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At the start of 2024, we had a crazy idea to vertically integrate crypto infrastructure and apps to build what Bitcoin tried but failed to be: a peer to peer electronic cash system. Why did we think we’d succeed where countless others had failed?. We had a radically different.
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2/3 Argentinians convert between fiat and stablecoins at least once a month
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have you ever been suspended or banned from a financial app? . coinbase/venmo/back/wise/revolut/etc.
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65% of people use P2P exchanges to convert between fiat and stablecoins, and 58% use Binance
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again in Argentina, 22% get paid by their main job in stables. And 14% are employed by a foreign company.
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In the next decade, governments are going to have to reconcile privacy with regulation. This same tension happened when https and web encryption was created. The US government pushed against it, but privacy won because it helps humanity more than it hurts it. This is the same.
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so i ended up revealing some of our tech on cross chain intent routing to enable 1-tap defi in payy.
Talking with @sidgandhi_xyz and @payy_link in 40mins (12N EST/ 4UTC). Don't miss this conversation! .
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most frequent q i've gotten this last week: . wHy R U bUidLing PaYmeNTs apP?! . here's the long story: . when i went back and read the bitcoin whitepaper last year i realized we were so busy fing around with defi that we failed to live up to satoshi's original vision:.
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love the clarity of the roadmap towards a singular goal.
It’s time to go bigger 🦣. Announcing results from Mammoth Mini, a testnet averaging ~27MB/s of *permissionless* data throughput in its first iteration. Mammoth Mini is the community’s next step towards 1 GB blocks.
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if you're going to eth denver, i'm giving a talk on thursday (29th) about why i miss cash. and how we can get back what we liked about it.
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if you're in nyc on august 10th, check out zkcon — i'll be speaking about what's next for Payy alongside some awesome zk folks.
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about once a week i wake up in the middle of the night with debanking anxiety.
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we did it fammmmmmm!!!!.
Cash Is King: What We Lost on the Way to Crypto. Presented by @sidgandhi_xyz from @polybase_xyz. Watch the full video below 👇
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Privacy represents an aspect of freedom. Freedom to do what you want without being judged or exposed. This freedom is protected by the constitutions of many countries, but for some reason it has been lost in crypto.
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another day, another space.
Talking with @sidgandhi_xyz and @payy_link in 40mins (12N EST/ 4UTC). Don't miss this conversation! .
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guess i can post this now. i've been banned on coinbase for years now. never even did an onchain transfer. everytime i try to sign up again, they ban me after KYC bc my SSN is blacklisted. the only reason you need a CEX now is for free fiat ramping, but not for long.
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initiate payments narrative v5 .(this time it will work).
Everyone is talking about payments.
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don't build your stablecoin bank on eth, sol or L2s. your users don't want their net worth showing on the internet.
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did they tell you we have zk proofs for utxos working on mobile in <1s. show me any other performant zk for privacy in production that is free and usable by normies. and I’ll give you $100.
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institutional neutrality . the megatrend for 2025.
🎉🎉🎉. All on the same day:. 1. Stanford’s board of trustees commends the faculty senate on its institutional neutrality statement. 2. Penn leadership declares a policy of institutional neutrality. 3. Yale sets up a committee to consider institutional neutrality. 🧵.
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implement that graphic in react native to apply.
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one of our engineers wanted to convert their salary to crypto. we pay them on deel. deel tried to charge him $300 to convert to USDC. then he moved it to revolut (free). then tried to go to binance, but binance doesn't allow deposits in dollars his country (europe). so he tried.
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blockchains are a replacement technology . the easier it is to go from tradfi -> onchain. the faster the replacement will happen . instant, free, seamless onramping. we’ve stalled this progress in the last cycle. real crypto maus havent increased.
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fastest growing crypto countries: first half 24. Mauritius (+1018%).Latvia (285%).Montenegro (+224%).Croatia (+137%).Greece (+107%).
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3 facts. • payments is the first and strongest use case of crypto.• payments must be private.• @payy_link is the ONLY private payments app normies can use right NOW.
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@ShinyQuagsire incorrect cause/effect relationship. they increase fan speeds bc user is likely not to hear them if ambient sound is loud. they do it because they *can*.
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the US Treasury just released a Q4 report. it has 20 slides on digital assets / crypto. i looked at all the slides 👇.
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@collision @stripe @solana just remember, all your stripe purchases will now be public on the blockchain forever 😂.
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why did we build payy? . before we started working on payy, we asked our friends and colleagues if they’d ever had trouble sending money to other countries. almost all of them had a story to tell. we heard a story from an investor who sends money to a family overseas to help.
what if sending money was as easy as sending a message? to anyone, in any country. instantly. privately. for free. sound impossible?. it’s possible with @payy_link. an app that lets you pay anyone in the world, instantly and privately, for free. 1. venmo is US-only → try payy.
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@Plumferno @0xMert_ not saying bugs don’t happen and also not a maxi on any ecosystem. is unclear so far whether this is actually a bug or a bigger architectural issue in solana.
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nowadays i die a little every time i have to sign up for a new app.
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yup. and we are releasing a bunch of new features soon so people that come in more often will see them first 😁.
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you can't look at a chart and say things are good. i've been in buenos aires for over a week and the reality is grim. everything is crazy expensive for normal people.
ARS/USD is at exactly the same level as it was one year ago. Quite an impressive turnaround for a currency that was previously on a seemingly unstoppable road to hyperinflation. Inflation rates have also been decreasing quickly in recent months.
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all you ever wanted to know about @payy_link.(and probably way more 😅).
NEW POD: Where is the Killer Payment App of Crypto?. Dive into the future of onchain banking with @nickwh8te & @sidgandhi_xyz: .- Current state of crypto payments .- @payy_link's approach to solving crypto UX.- Value of self-custody in financial services.- Modular vs. monolithic
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