LazerPay — the Nigerian startup building the Stripe for cryptocurrency — has launched in beta. And it’s giving early access to 500 businesses and creators in Africa.
Ahead of this beta launch, LazerPay had received an undisclosed amount of investment from Nestcoin — an innovative venture that builds, operates and invests in products making crypto accessible to everyone.
While launching Breach — a media platform aimed at driving crypto education and adoption across Africa — earlier this month, Nestcoin had said it’d rollout more products and services “unlocking the remarkable powers of crypto”.
LazerPay is one of such products. And Emmanuel Njoku, a prolific blockchain engineer, is the CEO.
To be one of the first that would experience LazerPay, fill this registration form.
Why LazerPay?
With an increasing number of people holding crypto assets, the next natural step is to make it possible to transact more with them. Various companies are working hard to make it easier to use crypto like fiat money, from investing and swapping to everyday payments.
Despite the progress, many traditional businesses — particularly in Africa — struggle to integrate crypto offerings into their platforms. In essence, this locks out a whole world of potential customers with high purchasing power.
For instance, a traditional business needs to set up a wallet address on a crypto exchange, accept payments from limited types of crypto, and then work P2P hurdles to exchange their crypto for fiat. Alternatively, they have someone provide an address and give the person a cut for converting it to fiat money on their behalf. Both ways come with challenges that range from complexity to losing cash to fraudsters.
“We’ve built an infrastructure that abstracts these complexities and helps businesses accept crypto payments securely”, LazerPay said.
How does LazerPay work?
It works like Stripe, but for crypto. Businesses can use either of these channels to accept crypto payments from their customers:
- Integrate a collections widget in their apps.
- Collect payments through a link.
Both options support payment with any cryptocurrency, and there are no limits. In essence, as a company using LazerPay, you get to receive payments from anywhere in the world. “We’ve done the heavy lifting; companies just need to integrate or create links to start accepting in minutes”, the Stripe for crypto explains.
On settlements, all payments are converted into stable coins into the client’s LazerPay wallet. Stable coins are the crypto equivalent of an existing fiat currency and are more stable than regular crypto. Hence, the choice of the conversion is to protect clients from volatility. From there, clients can choose to withdraw into their crypto wallets or directly into a bank account of their choice.
Beyond Payments
Companies need more than smoother payments to scale; they need support to grow their funds and retain their customers. That’s why LazerPay offers a growth fund and a token system.
The growth fund places amounts approved by business owners in algorithmic managed decentralised finance (DeFi) investments to earn beyond average returns (up to 10% per annum).
The Lazerpay tokens are similar to any regular currency and gain value based on activities carried out on the platform. Besides empowering members of its business community to make controlling decisions, LazerPay aims to use these tokens to provide liquidity that businesses can use as rewards for their customers.
