Such innovation and disruption you guys
Okay that might sound really sarcastic and cynical but I am surprisingly very pleased with Venmo's crypto integration setup. First, they offered me a sweet credit card with a decent limit, which is nice because I already use the Venmo app semi-regularly and getting a credit card through them means I can access it through the Venmo app which I already use and don't need to bloat my phone with extra garbage.
But the real kicker with that credit card is the cashback program.
I basically buy everything I can with this card because the cashback automatically buys Bitcoin every month, so I've been running an experiment to see how worth it this actually is. Thus far I'd say it's been pretty damn worth it because my corn on Vemno is worth over $200 right now... which is essentially free money given to me for products I was going to buy anyway (mostly bi-weekly food bills), on top of the fact that the bull market rally hasn't even happened yet (in theory). The goal here is for that $200+ to skyrocket to something in the four figures area so I can make a big purchase like a new computer. Would be a fun story to tell... free computer from a credit card cashback program would be insane.
Buy why PYUSD?
When Venmo first introduced their stablecoin I didn't think anything of it. Just another dumb corporation creating another dumb stablecoin. However, now that I'm actually using PYUSD I'm realizing how powerful it is for a random corporation to create their own stablecoin. It blows the system wide open in a way I didn't even realize was possible.
For those of you who don't know, Venmo is a P2P banking service that only operates in USA. It gained popularity by attempting to merge banking with social media lite. You can like and comment on people's public transactions, but more importantly the identity of people is connected to their phone numbers, so you can import a "friends list" to Venmo using their number and then send money back and forth and the fee is $0 (unless you do instant withdrawal to bank which I never do because I'm not a paycheck to paycheck type of guy). Founded in 2009, it was successful enough to be bought out by Paypal for a hefty sum of $800M back in 2013. The demographic for the app seems to be Millennials and Zoomers, so there's a big market.
Venmo is a P2P banking service that only operates in USA
At first when Venmo integrated crypto it was a completely closed system. You could buy Bitcoin/LTC/BCH/ETH/LINK in the beginning, but you couldn't actually transfer any of that value to an external wallet. While this was a minor disappointment it made sense... because again Venmo is a banking service that only operates within US borders. Allowing external transfers means that money can cross borders and would likely be an international legal nightmare for such a small and sleek company.
Well... I don't know how they pulled it off, but external transfers are now allowed, and they've not only integrated Solana into their warchest but also integrated the pyusd stablecoin into Solana, which means I can send their stablecoin to outside wallets basically for free rather than doing it on ETH. This has made the logistics of paying a certain someone much easier.
Who am I paying?
Several weeks back my girlfriend approached me with an interesting proposition. One of her coworkers asked if I could tutor his kid in the game of chess. While that's a flattering prospect I'm actually not very good at chess even though I've played a lot of games. I figured if this kid wants tutoring he's probably already better than me, and it turned out that he was indeed already much better.
Chalk it up to playing those games while also smoking pot; not the best learning environment. I'm actually a little annoyed at how "bad" I am at chess when looking at how much time I've put into it. It's just not a game I seem to be naturally gifted at the higher levels. Maybe it's too much memorization or maybe I just don't take it seriously enough to improve dramatically.
In any case I had a bit of a eureka moment after considering this offer for a moment... because I actually know a master chess player that also has experience specifically tutoring players in chess. He goes by the name of @samostically and I met him right here on Hive.
So I put Sam in contact with my girlfriend's coworker and he easily got the job. And I quote, "This is the best thing that's happened to me in 2 years." endquote... which was simultaneously and ironically perhaps the happiest and saddest thing I had read in two years.
But there was a problem... Sam lives in Nigeria. In fact Sam had to outright ask if it was okay that he was Nigerian because he's lost work over his nationality before. You might be surprised to learn this (I kind of was) but apparently you can't even send Paypal payments to citizens of Nigeria... they can send money out but can't accept money for themselves. The scammers in Nigeria have really ruined it for everyone haven't they?
So what to do?
Easy enough, right? I'll just send Sam HBD on Hive and the coworker can pay me directly on Venmo. Then I can either choose to keep the money in my bank account or funnel it back into crypto. It's not a ton of money so there were a lot of options available to me, but that's when I discovered that PYUSD could be transferred out of Venmo and given to Sam directly, which is what I now do. I could try to contact the coworker and tell him how to do this as well, to make the payment even more direct, but I think he appreciates the simplicity of not having to deal with it.
While the amount of money given for these chess lessons is not a ton, they were doing three sessions a week for the first few weeks. This was akin to cramming for a test because there was a Pennsylvania state tournament coming at the end of the month. And at the risk of doxing myself and the kid: I was shocked that this kid actually won the state championship. Apparently he got out of a lot of sticky situations from all that tutoring... so I guess now Sam can add to his resume that his tutoring resulted in a State Championship in USA? Crazy stuff.
And again, while the amount of money I'm sending Sam is relatively small potatoes to me... when they were doing three sessions a week this small wage amounted to more than he was being paid at his full time job, which perhaps is an invasion of privacy to mention without permission but I think it's just too crazy to not talk about within this context. I wanted to post numbers but will refrain from doing so. Let's just say we looked into how much Chess tutoring costs in the USA and picked a number that was on the low end of the curve, which was also coincidentally x3 more than Sam's last tutoring gig.
Conclusion
So yeah... crypto is essentially acting as the jailbreak for financial institutions that only operated in the USA before to go global. Using PYUSD you can send "dollars" to anyone in the world on Solana. They are clearly still tweaking the system as well because the first transaction had a small network fee but more recent transactions had a $0 fee, creating a completely frictionless economy in which even small amounts can flow freely and globally. Crazy stuff when you think about it.
And also kudos to Sam for being a good teacher and the kid for getting a big win on the first try. Cheers!