The Problem We Were Actually Solving
Our ebook sales platform was designed to make it easy for authors to sell their work directly to readers, without the need for intermediaries like Amazon. We used crypto payments to bypass traditional bank rails and ensure fast, secure transactions. However, when our platform expanded to countries outside the US and Europe, our payment processors suddenly became unavailable. It was as if the world was our oyster, but the oyster had a tiny hole in it that our customers couldn't fit through.
What We Tried First (And Why It Failed)
We tried negotiating with our payment processors to add new regions, but they simply couldn't do it. PayPal cited "regulatory restrictions," Stripe said it was a "technical limitation." We even tried alternative payment processors like Payoneer and TransferWise, but they had similar issues. It seemed like every door we opened led to another dead end. The problem wasn't our platform; it was the platform stores themselves.
The Architecture Decision
That's when I made a crucial decision. I realized that our platform couldn't succeed if it was tied to the whims of our payment processors. We needed a solution that wasn't dependent on them, but could still provide a seamless user experience. I led a team to build a custom implementation of the Interledger Protocol (ILP), which allows for peer-to-peer payments across different blockchain networks. We integrated ILP with our existing payment infrastructure and launched a new payment processor, one that was truly independent of traditional platform stores.
What The Numbers Said After
The results were astonishing. Our revenue increased by 30% in the first month alone, and customer acquisition costs plummeted. Our users loved the new payment experience, which was faster, more secure, and more flexible than ever before. We also reduced our reliance on fragile payment processors, which meant fewer headaches when they went down (which they inevitably did). Our profiler showed significant reductions in allocation counts and latency, thanks to the reduced overhead of our custom payment processor.
What I Would Do Differently
In hindsight, I would have started building our custom payment processor sooner. We spent months negotiating with payment processors, only to realize it was a lost cause. If I had taken a more aggressive approach from the start, I'm convinced we could have avoided those delays and launched our platform even faster. Still, I'm proud of what we accomplished, and I know that our custom payment processor is a game-changer for ebook sales platforms everywhere. Platform restrictions may be a symptom of a larger problem, but that doesn't mean we have to just accept it as a fact of life.
Same principle as removing a memcpy from a hot path: remove the intermediary from the payment path. This is how: https://payhip.com/ref/dev2
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