COINQVEST - Enterprise Cryptocurrency Payment Processing

Image header:

Project title:

COINQVEST - Enterprise Cryptocurrency Payment Processing. Accept Digital Currencies, Settle in USD, EUR, NGN.

Summary:

COINQVEST is an enterprise cryptocurrency payment gateway providing an all-in-one solution for merchants to effortlessly accept cryptocurrency payments online and settle into fiat, thus keeping consistent books and staying compliant. 

Category:

Applications

Goals:

COINQVEST’s mission is to lower the payment barrier for the world’s merchants to join the global economy through simple digital payment processing. We process sales safely and efficiently for online merchants of all sizes and origins. Think of it as Stripe for crypto.

Product Development


Payments and settlements are production-ready and accessible via API and hosted checkouts. Register for your merchant account at www.coinqvest.com.

In Q2 we will continue to develop additional platform features, such as more detailed balance sheets, transaction history, accounting and analytics tools, financial and tax reports, data exports, and so on.

Currently COINQVEST works with any HTTP Rest Client, in any programming language. To make integration even easier, we started developing SDKs and integration kits for several programming languages and are improving the platform based on feedback. We hope to push the first SDKs live in Q3.

Go-To-Market Strategy

Initially we need to explain to merchants how they can now accept digital currencies with minimal overhead. All that, while staying compliant, and settling in a currency friendly to their accountants and regulators.

Our plan to increase adoption for COINQVEST is to initially go with a developer-first focus and streamline merchants implementation of crypto payments into their existing checkout processes. We want a product that speaks for itself. A clean and pleasant UI, comprehensive API documentation and SDKs are our approach to achieve that.

Additionally, we are putting a focus on content marketing (see the COINQVEST blog) and developing a B2B sales strategy. A PR campaign enlisting several crypto media outlets is being worked on.

Funding & Regulatory:

We are bootstrapped. In order to stem regulatory requirements and build the team for our commercial rollout, we are considering external investment.

Timeline:

See Goals.

Description:

COINQVEST provides digital currency checkouts that automatically go from Bitcoin (or any other currency anchored on the Stellar Network) to an online merchant's bank account, in minutes. COINQVEST helps merchants programmatically accept and settle payments in new digital currencies while staying compliant, keeping their accountants and tax authorities happy. With COINQVEST, sales can be denominated and settled in a merchant's local fiat currency (e.g. EUR, USD or NGN) regardless of whether their customers pay in Bitcoin, Ether or Stellar Lumens.

The COINQVEST platform provides the following key features:

• COINQVEST Offers Real-time Currency Conversion and Instant Transaction Settlement: Customers choose from a list of cryptocurrencies to submit payment. COINQVEST automatically exchanges/converts payment into the seller's desired currency. Funds are deposited in the merchant's wallet or account. Once a payment is executed, settlement takes only seconds.

• COINQVEST Enables Risk-free Transactions: Transactions take place on the Stellar Network — they are exchanged, tracked, and viewable immediately with transparency. Inter-currency fluctuation is minimized and there is no risk of non-payment.

• COINQVEST Supports Compliant Accounting: COINQVEST’s business toolkit includes analytics and tax-keeping data to keep enterprises tuned-in and compliant. It pinpoints effective strategies or revenue leaks, and equips businesses with automated invoicing and financial reporting.

• COINQVEST Provides Easy Integration for Developers: It provides two integration methods for an enterprise’s current setup. Our hosted checkout option is as simple as placing our checkout button on a website’s payment page. Advanced uses connect to COINQVEST’s REST API which allows our service to mesh with their online business.

Benefits of COINQVEST for the Stellar Network

• COINQVEST is tightly knit with anchors and provides them with new revenue streams
• COINQVEST brings assets/volume onto the DEX, every time a merchant makes a sale
• COINQVEST opens an adoption path for online merchants previously unaware of Stellar
• COINQVEST is part of the high availability Tier 1 Core Quorum and operates three full validators
• COINQVEST runs a fast and public Horizon deployment
• COINQVEST provides a functional and globally available payment gateway built on the SDEX

How COINQVEST uses Stellar:

• COINQVEST works closely with Stellar cryptocurrency anchors to enable native payments on numerous blockchains
• COINQVEST also integrates with Stellar fiat anchors to deposit merchants' funds in their bank accounts
• COINQVEST makes heavy use of strict-receive and the new strict-send path payment operations
• COINQVEST monitors currency prices on the SDEX and initiates conversions in real-time
• COINQVEST takes advantage of Stellar’s unparalleled architecture to add anchors in no time, thus able to roll out into new markets

For more details, team members, API docs, please visit www.coinqvest.com

And, of course, we’d love to hear your feedback! Connect with us on our public Keybase channel @coinqvest.public or chat directly with @marcinx or @xiaohu

Gallery/Screenshots:

Easy and Compliant Billing via UI or API:

Customer Management, Transaction Records and Invoicing via UI or API:

Instant Withdrawals to Fiat or Blockchain via UI or API:

Real Time API Logging:

Developer Friendly API Request Monitoring:

Roles And Access Control:

Expandable Integrations:

Enterprise Level APIs:

Hosted or (white-label) API Level Checkouts:

Hosted Checkout Demo Shop

Please try out the demo shop for SCF to test hosted checkouts from the perspective of a customer. You can test a micro-payment by selecting the blue t-shirt and paying 0.01 USD with any Stellar asset (we support strict-send and strict-receive path payment operations) or native XRP. Alternatively you can test the other options to pay with a larger variety of supported cryptocurrencies (native Bitcoin, Ethereum or Litecoin). Ping us on Keybase afterwards and we'll refund your payment. This is a hosted checkout, which takes minimal effort to implement in existing online shops. Merchants can also opt for fully un-branded API level checkouts in their backend.

Links:

• COINQVEST Platform
• API Documentation
• Blog: Why We Chose Stellar as Payment Rails for Cryptocurrency Settlement.
• Blog: COINQVEST Integrates with Vetted Stellar Anchors for Seamless Cross-Currency Settlement
• Blog: COINQVEST launches three full validators on the Stellar Network and co-establishes SCP Tier 1 Core Quorum Group.
• Blog: The Beauty of Programmable Money and Real-Time Settlement. From Sales in Bitcoin to your Bank Account in Minutes.
• COINQVEST Blog
• Hosted Checkout Demo Shop

Tags:

Online Payments, Payment Processing, Payment Gateway, Digital Payments

kolten Did you throw 0.01 USD in crypto at the shop? I don't see your payment in our demo shop merchant account. You got to ship the moneys to get the goods, mate! Kidding. Also, disclaimer: NOT AN ACTUAL T-SHIRT

Thanks for the feedback on the integrations page. Everything on there is actually something that can also be queried by API. For example, the merchant can query available fiat currencies programmatically and then decide which one he would like to use as settlement currency.

A merchant can also query which asset issuers (anchors) they want to work with and specify those as processors in their checkouts. E.g. someone might only want to work with BTC anchors that are incorporated in the US and that information can be pulled from the GET /asset-issuers API, etc.

Last but not least there might be several asset issuers (anchors) for a given currency. The integrations page and the corresponding API make it easy for you to decide which one is most suitable for your business/use case.

kolten We do vet them. It's actually quite important for us because we have quite a responsibility towards our merchants. In a nutshell there's four criteria that we're looking at:

1) Good liquidity on the network (we can't use them if there's only small amounts on each side of the order book)

2) Healthy market making with reasonable spread and fast refills (we are market takers and offers on the DEX need to be refilled quickly when we buy them up during the conversion process from e.g. BTC to USD. This is quite crucial. Imagine some high volume merchant processing a lot of orders and the books on the DEX dry up on one side. Wouldn't look good at all.

3) Trust. It needs to be an entity that is probably still going to be around in five years.

4) Technical competence. The anchor needs to be able to provide normalized interfacing via SEP-6 (or SEP-24 with some adaptations to make it suitable for non-interactive flows).

At this stage we're happy to work with almost anyone but as our product matures and the Stellar Network grows these criteria are going to become increasingly important.

More info here: COINQVEST Integrates with Vetted Stellar Anchors for Seamless Cross-Currency Settlement

Hey everyone!

We just released our first SDK. PHP is now live at: https://github.com/COINQVEST/php-merchant-sdk

Would love to hear your feedback!

Coming next: Ruby, Node.js, Python, Go and Rust.

Hey @OrbitLens !

Really like your project, @marcinx. I was wondering for quite a while what exactly was brewing in your secret lab. Enterprise-grade payment gateway is definitely a cool thing.

Thanks for the nice feedback! Really appreciate it.

A note/suggestion: from my practice, people often forget to add memo to the payment.

Same here. During our UI planning over 50% of our test subjects simply didn't put the memo. We went the easy way for now and highlighted the memo label in red in the UI. This helped a little. We've only been live for a couple of weeks but almost 100% of our few processed sales have been done in BTC, so we have no metrics yet how much of a problem XLM memos are in the wild with our payment UI.

By the way, besides the PayPal style hosted checkouts, merchants can also opt for a white-label (purely backend based) integration where they build the checkout UI themselves. There are some recommendations how to highlight the memo in our API docs but in those cases their UX is beyond our control.

I hope that with the new muxed accounts feature this problem will eventually go away

We actually have high hopes for your SEP-0029 That is actually the main reason why we didn't pursue memo optimization any further for now. Your SEP will eliminate the memo problem pretty much entirely I think. It looks like it's going to land very soon. No need to wait for muxed.

show federated address by default

In our experience most people use generic wallets like Exodus that support a wide variety of cryptos natively. Unfortunately most of them don't understand federation. This is even more so the case for exchanges. Federated addresses are great but only really known in the Stellar microcosmos and even there adoption fluctuates. It's probably best to keep the Stellar account as default to avoid too much confusion for the average Joe. Your SEP should solve the whole missing memo issue.

generate new blank accounts for every deposit or per user

We've been considering that but there are a few hoops to this. Some crypto anchors have our custodial accounts white listed for deposits, withdrawals, and SEP-10 for example. It would add a whole lot of additional complexity on our end as well as on the anchor's end to use disposable accounts. Another consideration was increased overhead for streaming these accounts. There can be an arbitrary number of them to monitor at any time and this doesn't seem to scale well.

The second approach may be quite interesting for clients with relatively large average payment amount because it streamlines the UX, makes it really tricky to mess with memos, offers a separate audit history on ledger explorer for each user/deposit, and provides better privacy (blank accounts get created and deleted after the successful payments).

The on-chain audit history is something we had in mind as well. It's a strong argument. For now we have a second-layer solution for that where merchants download their reports from our platform along with tx and op ids.

On the other hand, it adds an additional level of complexity, because you need to create account, monitor payments for it, and merge back to your vault account once a payment received or payment time expired.

This.

Also, don't know whether you've seen it or not, we crafted operations-notifier service for tracking Stellar payments for cases like yours. Maybe it will come in handy.

Yes, we've seen it and it's pretty great! There was no need for it so far because we're running custodial but definitely something we have in mind for the future (if/when we adopt disposable accounts). Maybe we can take that discussion somewhere else but I've been wondering about the notification/reaction mechanism. It looks like it's wired for HTTP callbacks. We had problems with those on our single account streams (particularly when we wanted to replay large amounts of operations) and went with Redis queues instead. The account listener pushes any new payments to a Redis list and the processor service picks them up at its own speed. No TCP/IP needed. Looks like it would be straight-forward enough to adapt this in the notifier accordingly though.

marcinx @orbit84 Well, that landed faster than expected! Added SEP29 support just now Our deposit accounts are now marked with config.memo_required and we inspect destination accounts before initiating UI/API withdrawals. Thanks for bringing SEP29 to Stellar! It's definitely a winner.

Hey!

Merchant SDK for NodeJS is now live at: https://github.com/COINQVEST/nodejs-merchant-sdk

We now support SDKs for PHP, Ruby and Node.

Developer Guide: Accept Cryptocurrency Payments with COINQVEST Merchant APIs

Would love to hear your feedback!

tmacshaq Hey! Thanks for your excellent questions.

How do you deal with currency fluctuations in 60 minute checkout window. If value of XLM drops 10% the seller takes the loss?

Great question. Thanks. In short, we use a community pool to mitigate price fluctuations. The settlement price for the merchant is guaranteed. I coincidentally answered this in depth on a Reddit thread a few days ago.

From your website it seems like you're operating a centralized business and exchanging currencies? The legal aspect of this is a nightmare especially since you exchange currencies. To operate in AMerica you need a money exchange license and each "exchange" actually involves capital sales. How do you plan on keeping track of all this?

This is a great question and a big topic for us internally. Basically CQ's initial go-to-market strategy is defined/limited by regulatory requirements and Stellar's current and future anchor integrations.

For CQ two questions are at the core/top of decision making: a) can we operate legally in a market and b) is there a good and liquid fiat anchor to make market entry feasible?

Regarding a), there are basically two options: get licenses for each single country/market or find cooperation partners and use their licenses on a license-as-a-service cooperation model.

And for b), we follow the anchor development process which seems to have a focus on Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. That also means we don't accept merchants from the US and EU currently. They can register but not fully operate on the platform yet.

We don't actually see it as a "nightmare". It's a process with very clearly defined requirements and there are several options to stay compliant in different jurisdictions.

Last point- until you provide a traditional on ramp (Paypal, credit card etc...) it will run into the same problem as other payment projects like StellarPay and SWPlug- no one will use it because very few people have any Stellar assets to start with. Its not worth the integration effort for a retail shop for something that only does Stellar.

Completely agree and our product is actually fundamentally different from the ones you mentioned. CQ accepts native Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and XRP alongside any asset on the Stellar Network. That's actually one of our most exciting features. We work with crypto anchors to convert native BTC into tokens on the Stellar Network during the payment process. Once the funds are captured we use the SDEX to convert them into the merchant's preferred settlement currency.

When a customer selects Bitcoin on the checkout page, he is actually presented with a native Bitcoin deposit address (given by one of our anchor partners) and sends native Bitcoin to that address. In fact, he is probably entirely unaware that Stellar is involved. All he knows is that he sent Bitcoin to some Bitcoin address.

We published a blog post on that topic, which covers the process in more detail. Another blog post here explains it even more.

Our competitors are BitPay, Coinbase Commerce and similar companies. We think that working on Stellar gives us a competitive edge over them because of its anchor system. We can add new crypto payment options as well as fiat off-ramps in a snap, as soon as they are anchored on Stellar by some trusted entity. It takes a whole lot of resources and jumping through hoops for our competitors to add new currencies. For us it's just another interface to SEP-6/24/26 compliant anchors. As the Stellar Network grows, so do we.

On a side note:

We started working with select merchants since our soft launch/POC release a couple of weeks ago and it works really well so far. In our experience, almost all sales are done in native Bitcoin. Disappointingly, we haven't seen a single Stellar payment yet. You already mentioned that this isn't a big surprise. According to this source, Bitcoin has around 0.75 million active addresses a day and Stellar only has 75 thousand active accounts per day. The Stellar ecosystem is still very young but moving super fast - we're excited to contribute.

I think it's worth pointing out that, in a sense, COINQVEST uses the Stellar Network in the very fundamental way it was originally imagined. Our platform is a tool that takes an arbitrary asset from some entity, pulls it onto the network, transforms it, and finally takes it off the network in a different shape, to a different entity.

Cheers!

inative Hey! Our Horizon is briefly down for protocol 13 migrations. About to proxy it to SDF. We're going to deploy a blue/green setup for situations like this where Horizon maintenance requires downtime. It's on our roadmap but low priority at the moment.

PS: Excited to hear you're playing around with our APIs. Let me know if you need any help. @marcinx on Keybase.

PPS: Our Horizon is back up and proxies to SDF while we're doing maintenance.