Milestone Celebration: $300m in Crypto Payments

Global Teams Need Global Payments

Remote work is a historic transformation in the human story. Companies are no longer confined to their borders in search of talent. Talent too, need not leave their home shores in search of global work opportunities. 

But global teams need efficient global payments.

With distributed teams based all over the world, the current state of cross-border payments remains a challenge to businesses. A 2022 survey by Wise of over 1,000 small businesses in the UK found that 24% put off entering new markets due to the cost and inconvenience of international banking. 

Traditional payment methods such as wire transfers and credit cards are slow and expensive. The cost of processing a payment through banks is excessive, with fees averaging over $36.50 per transaction and even taking a cut of up to 10% of the total transfer value. 

Blockchains offer universal, fast, and cheap payment settlements. Each year, it is estimated that we can save as much as $300 billion in remittance fees, and $118 billion in the cost of failed payments.

Unsurprisingly crypto companies are pioneering remote-first organizations, leading the growth in remote work globally. 45% of blockchain-related jobs advertised on Indeed in 2022 were remote, nearly triple the global average of 16% across employment sectors. 

Each time a stablecoin depegs, crypto asset prices nosedive, or when regulators sue stablecoin issuers - pundits and skeptics are quick to scoff at crypto’s real world utility.

Stablecoins are dismissed as being mere “poker chips” - a gateway to the speculative casinos of meme token launches, or the precariously high yields offered by more dubious decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols.

Our numbers tell a different story - of how crypto payments are powering global teams.

Making Crypto Payments Easy for Enterprises

But despite their potential - crypto today is nearly impossible for enterprises to use. And that’s a problem. Think about the payments you make. Getting your salary, or when you buy groceries, or shop online. Most of them involve a business at one end of the transaction. 

Crypto payments processes today are incredibly labor-intensive, vulnerable to fraud, and prone to human error. Wallet addresses must be copy-pasted from a spreadsheet, or PDF invoices. Transactions must be signed one by one. Payment confirmations from blockchain explorers must be manually sent to all beneficiaries.

And at the end of each month, when you are done dealing with all of that, you are left with raw block explorer data. No historical exchange rates to fiat, variable gas fees, no names or personally identifiable information, no labels. 

This is what you must use, to generate proper financial reports for audit, accounting, tax, or anti-money laundering (AML) purposes. It also makes it practically impossible to understand a team’s financial health in crypto.

Request Finance eliminates these frictions that make it difficult for enterprises to use crypto. In doing so, we hope to solve critical barriers to broader crypto adoption.

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Change the World With Us

Sometimes we get asked: what is your total addressable market?

But who could have told you with any precision, what the addressable market for smartphones was in 1990? What do you think it replaces? A camera, a fax machine, a phone, the radio, and now even a bank cheque book, and stock broker.

Even if you consider just the annual global B2B payments volume, that is well over 100x the entire market capitalization of crypto today - regardless of which data source you pick. To be even more conservative, you could roll up all the different payroll, expenses and invoicing businesses in the world today like Deel, Bill.com, and Expensify.

If you believe like we do, that on-chain payments are the future of digital payments then the sky’s the limit. 

We’re eager to reach new heights in the crypto payments space - but we need your help. Here’s how you can join our rocketship:

A club for Web3 CFOs. We recently launched the web3cfo.club - a rapidly-growing, exclusive community of Finance & Operations leaders at prominent Web3 companies like Bankless, Consensys, Edge and Node, The Sandbox, and more. 

Know someone who fits the bill? Invite them to the club, or apply here 😎.

Helping crypto accountants. We also host regular podcasts on The Accountant Quits, speaking with Web3 finance and operations leaders on emerging issues, and best practices at the intersection of crypto assets, finance, and accounting. We’ve also recently launched a partner program, aimed at allowing more accounting and audit firms to become channel partners. 

Know an accountant, or operations professional working in a web3 team? Send them our way!

New tokens, chains, and features. We’re expanding our in-app features beyond just crypto invoicing. Salaries, expenses, escrow, and even in-app yield farming are just some of the upcoming features to be developed in the roadmap. Tell us what you’d like to see us develop next!

The number of cryptocurrencies supported on Request Finance is second to none, and continues to grow each month. Freelancers, DAOs, and crypto project teams can now send and receive payments in 150+ cryptocurrencies and stablecoins, 9+ fiat currencies, and 18+ blockchains. 

If you’d like to see a new token or chain supported in the app, let us know here.

We hope you'll continue helping us shape the future of finance! 👋

Feel free to get in touch through email, follow us on Twitter, or join our Discord channel!