Welcome to Amberdata's Podcast series featuring leaders in the Crypto space where we go in-depth and dive into various topics.

In this episode, Chris Martin, Amberdata's Director of Research, interviews Eleni Steinman and Shane Van Coller, Co-Founders at Loop Crypto.

Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational purposes only. Nothing here is trading advice or solicitation.

Amberdata's Head of Research, Chris Martin is joined by Eleni Steinman and Shane van Coller, Co-Founders of Loop Crypto. Loop Crypto is changing the face of payment processing in the crypto industry, introducing pull mechanisms and bringing the industry closer to traditional payment services.

Overview of the Podcast Discussion

In this Amberdata podcast, they discuss solutions they are building to enable streamlined cryptocurrency payments. This episode focuses on how payments work and the benefits of pull mechanisms to reduce fraud and chargebacks. In addition, Eleni and Shane discuss account abstraction on Ethereum and its' potential benefits to security.

The Challenge with Crypto Payments

A key challenge in crypto is that wallets are set up for "push" transactions, requiring the sender to initiate. This makes collecting recurring payments like subscriptions difficult compared to "pull" mechanisms like credit cards.

Loop Crypto's Payment Rails

Loop Crypto creates rails to schedule and pull crypto payments. When customers authorize a recurring charge, Loop bots check every 2 minutes for incoming payments. Once received, they immediately process the transaction on-chain. This automation results in over 90% of scheduled payments being successfully paid on time.

To enable flexible billing, Loop minimizes on-chain data. Only authentication details are in smart contracts, with billing details in off-chain databases. This allows functionality like discounts, billing date changes, and trial periods that customers want.

Integration with Stripe's front end demonstrates how any company could build payment services on top of Loop's underlying protocol. Providing webhooks enables instant payment notifications.

Use Cases and Benefits

Loop sees traction from crypto native companies earning in crypto, but wanting to pay salaries and vendors in crypto. Stablecoins and layer 2s are popular for lower-value transactions. Loop abstracts complexities of gas fees and confirmation times away from users.

Account Abstraction

Account abstraction was discussed as a future Ethereum protocol change to transition wallets to smart contract accounts with programmable permissions. An ERC standard exists today to mimic the behavior.

Abstraction would enable smoother front-end experiences. For example, approving a token allowance and executing a trade could happen in one transaction versus two currently. It also allows gas fees to be paid in tokens, not just ETH.

Paymaster contracts could enable different ways to pay gas. For example, deducting USD Coin from a user's wallet, converting to ETH behind the scenes to pay gas, and refunding any excess. This abstracts complexity away from users.

While abstraction could provide future benefits, Loop is not focused on it currently given its off-chain processing model. However, as more abstraction applications launch particularly on layer 2s, Loop will monitor closely.

Key Takeaways

When asked what topics need more discussion in crypto, the guests felt there should be more scrutiny and restraint around launching new blockchains and apps without a clear purpose. They see the potential for chain specialization driven by use cases like trading or privacy.

In summary, the podcast provided an insightful overview of Loop Crypto's solutions to streamline cryptocurrency payments. Their approach showcases the potential of smart contract accounts and programmable money to enable new financial use cases.

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