We're still orders of magnitude smaller than Visa and Mastercard, but I do believe products like ours (and competition is red hot here, theres so much good choice!) will be good for consumers.

Money should be like a message: free and instant

We're open source btw, happy to show off codebase and review PRs

https://github.com/peanutprotocol/peanut-ui

https://peanut.me/

I've always found Japanese design fascinating

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47122789

Points: 267

# Comments: 119

As all my blog posts, no AI, all hand written.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46856311

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

At the same time I do get valuable info out of HN and don't want to miss out on it. How can I browse weekly, and not miss out?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46753869

Points: 3

# Comments: 4

at 4 heads, just randomly select a jury of 3. and you're back on track.

at a million heads, just sum up all their guesses, divide by one million, and then check the over/under of 0.50

I think there's two angles here: personal accounting for the user, and compliance for us as a company.

From a user perspective, it's your own responsibility to classify your transactions when you do your accounting, wether you're an individual or a business. So if you get paid via Peanut, you need to say if it was a donation, friend payment, income, etc.

From our own perspective on compliance, risk and fees, it depends a lot on what provider we're working with and in what jurisdiction the operate on. Sorry if that's not a satisfying answer ("it depends"); happy to go into more detail if you have a specific example in mind

Currently merchants get kind of shafted by VISA/Mastercard. Not only do they have to wait until they get their funds (sometimes even up to two weeks!), which is horrible for a business where cash flow is important, margins low and float very tight; they also pay huge fees on top!

Depending on geo, these fees can go from 1-3% (total) to >6-8% in geos like Argentina and Brazil (and even worse in some other places). That's insane.

Whilst stablecoin & blockchain adoption is not fundamentally impossible for Visa/MC (see this post for more info https://x.com/uwwgo/status/1973038511897923848), it is still a very long way off, and we expect to be very competitive, especially with sovereign nations pushing their own alternatives that we interoperate with (PIX, Mercadopago, DUITNOW, MB WAY etc)

I'm not quite sure I understand the logic of mentioning future merchant monetization plans on the landing page?

Apologies!

In practice, most currencies are actually liquid against the American dollar; and maybe a few other major coins. This is mostly a technical issue, since liquidity is fragmented and it is just easier to trade against what you know everyone else has: the all-dominant US Dollar [1].

Now, enough theory, how do we do it at Peanut?

Currently, all user balances at Peanut are dollarized; that means users hold USD stablecoins. This is a deliberate simplification; in the future, we plan to roll out other stablecoin support (especially important for Europeans. The rest of the world is pretty happy with holding USD).

When we have to do an exchange to a local currency, like Argentinian Pesos, we work with a local exchange provider. They are able to give us the best exchange rate, because we go directly from a USD-like stablecoin (USDC or USDT usually), to their currency.

For them, USDC & USDT are functionally equivalent to hard cash, and they price it accordingly. They also get it IMMEDIATELY; they don't have to wait multiple days until settlement and until we wire them the funds from some American or European Bank. This is much better for us than for other fintechs like Revolut or Wise; they have to have their own liquidity (and all the infra, compliance, and legal that that entails!)

In the future, I expect our exchange rates to get even better. As foreign exchange continues to grow ON chain, liquidity on chain will increase; until it is the largest (and thus CHEAPEST) exchange in the world.

[1] Note: with the slow end of Pax Americana under the current US regime, the adoption of US Dollar has actually been falling somewhat; replaced by sovereign nations and funds actually holding more gold instead of usd . That's also why we've seen gold at all time highs

US and EU banking rails are both fully supported!

You can also try the dev build at https://staging.peanut.me but it's quite unstable atm

(they are only claimable once, so please be courteous and don't claim all, leave some for other users!)

1. https://peanut.me/claim?c=42161&v=v4.3&i=5778#p=ms74xIbdGVSK...

2. https://peanut.me/claim?c=42161&v=v4.3&i=5779#p=G7V82WybXthy...

3. https://peanut.me/claim?c=42161&v=v4.3&i=5780#p=Rgpymby5wBbO...

4. https://peanut.me/claim?c=42161&v=v4.3&i=5781#p=6F5nKWjx2Kf6...

5. https://peanut.me/claim?c=42161&v=v4.3&i=5782#p=DtdJ0y2Ufayu...

Also, every country usually has their own payment app parallel to the banking system: Portugal, where i currently live, has MB WAY, Brazil has PIX, Argentina has Mercadopago, the US has Cashapp. None of these work with each other.

Money still feels like pre-dotcom era tech when it should feel like a whatsapp message: send instant, anywhere, and for free.

Me and my team have been building Peanut to make money feel like Whatsapp. Peanut is a payments app, like Cashapp, but it works in any country. On top of that, you do more than only instant Peanut to Peanut payments; Peanut works with Banks, Peanut works with apps like MercadoPago and Pix, and if they have none of that, Peanut also works with crypto.

We wanted to build Peanut the right way, and that’s why:

- We’re not published on any app store. Peanut is a Progressive Web App (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_app) (of which I sadly see way too few !!). This way we don’t have to bow to the Apple/Google tech cabal and can rely on open standards. - The core of peanut is decentralized & non-custodial. The only one that has control of the funds is the user; as it should be. Peanut is not like a traditional bank, where fraud, political instability, or a bank-run might pwn you. Your funds are always yours and no one else can touch them. - Your funds are secured by passkey. This is much harder to crack or extract than a password or pin, and you won’t get pwned if your seed phrase gets leaked. We think it’s a much better approach for consumers. - Trust is crucial; all the app code is open-source at https://github.com/peanutprotocol/peanut-ui/tree/peanut-wall... - The app is completely free; we only passthrough banking costs. The way we intend to make money is off of merchants in the future. We believe Visa and Mastercard take a way too big of a chunk of payments, and we can be competitive with them.

My personal favorite feature that we’ve built: generate a send link, drop it in a chat with the person you’re talking with, and let them receive it in whatever option they want (no questions asked!).

We’re still in Beta, so I hope you can forgive any tech hiccups. We’re also rolling out country support on a week-by-week basis; by the end of October we should have full EU, US & LATAM banking coverage. But I wanted to launch Show HN early, because I respect this community a lot and have always loved getting feedback from it (and often giving my own!).

Also, let me know your username and I’m happy to send you a few $ to play around with the app.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45424427

Points: 15

# Comments: 18