How Flexa plans to increase merchant adoption of cryptocurrency

Messari hosted a public AMA with Trevor Filter, co-Founder of Flexa in the Messari community group. Below is a transcript of the conversation.

You can find all of Messari's historical AMA's here

Messari: I'd like to welcome @tylerspalding and @trevf from Flexa! To get started could you guys give a quick intro on Flexa and yourselves?

Trevor: Hi everyone, excited to be here. I’m Trevor and lead our product and design teams here at Flexa. My background is in payments and user interface design, including for large companies like American Express, Bloomberg and several payments-related startups since.

Flexa was created to make payments faster and more efficient for merchants all over the world. We believe that the current payment infrastructure is too expensive and fraud-prone, so we’re building new infrastructure from the ground up using digital currencies

Messari: Thanks! We can jump right into some of the questions about your current roadmap and where things stand now. One question that came up a few times was around partnerships. You announced 100 retailers by the end of the year at Consensus. What is the current status of this?

Trevor: We’re still on track with our merchant partnership launches and really proud of who we’ve released to date. We also want to make sure that crypto doesn’t feel like a “passing fad” to these partners, and a big part of that is making sure that we’re able to show significant demand for crypto-based payments to these retailers.

As such, we’re currently very focused on enabling the Flexa Wallet SDK in apps other than those developed by Flexa (namely, SPEDN), and we anticipate that that progress will unlock a lot of progress on the merchant side into the holidays and early next year

Messari: How do you pitch Flexa to partners? What do you see as the biggest selling point and I guess on the flip side what have you seen as the biggest blocker when talking to merchants?

Trevor: As a network, we have two major types of “partners” — both merchants and wallets. We’ve found that merchants are drawn to the extremely low cost and fraud-resistant nature of our payments (versus legacy payment methods), while wallets are focused on providing spending utility to their users and the earning potential of staking Flexacoin.

It’s really about bringing buyers (consumers) and sellers (merchants) closer together and enabling them to each pay with and receive payment in the currencies of their choice. This often involves eliminating as many middlemen as possible

While there isn’t much resistance to enabling this kind of spending utility on the wallet side, we do run into friction with merchants, and we’ve seen it all. Everything from “what is cryptocurrency?” to concerns about who uses it. Therefore, we spend a lot of our time and energy on educating these partners about the reality of our industry (and its potential).

Messari: Why has some retailers disappeared from the app? Have any of them backed out?

What was the story behind Wholefoods being removed from SPEDN? Why was it not communicated? Will they come back? Did you learn some important lesson

Trevor: Great question. Frankly, we saw more demand than expected at launch and ran into a variety of technical, development, hardware, and process issues across a few partners. As a result, we had to take some merchants offline temporarily shortly after we launched—fortunately, we’ve been able to bring most of them back by now (in addition to launching several new partners since)

Messari: Why do you continue to work like a stealth project even though you have some of the biggest names, brands and experienced team that you work with?

Flexa is still not well known if measuring in num trading wallets, google results, social followers etc. Will there be a marketing push to change this?

Trevor: I think it’s a pretty simple answer, actually… Above all, we’re focused on delivering real value and real products (which, I’ll say, our partners appreciate far more than “marketing”). This isn’t to say that we aren’t public about what we’re developing—just two weeks ago, for example, we announced a major initiative with McKinsey and the Mall of America

Also, to be clear, Flexa is a B2B payments network (and not a consumer-facing company). With more wallets and tokens on the network, it will make much more sense to increase our consumer marketing focus in order to encourage spending on the network, across all of our partners.

Messari: How do you pick the coins you list?

Trevor: Well, the dream of Flexa is to enable spending at any app using any coin in any store, but obviously we have to start somewhere! We look for a combination of:

- Spendability (does the nature of the coin lend itself to being spent)

- Liquidity (can we safely trade for other coins or fiat)

- Community (is there enthusiasm among consumers to spend a particular coin)

Today, we’re specifically looking at coins that are more spendable, such as stablecoins and loyalty/reward tokens.

While Flexa can be interesting as an off-ramp for speculative coins, our real focus is on coins that people are looking to spend every day. So, for example, what projects think about how coins end up in someone’s hands? Are there coins that consumers would feel comfortable receiving in lieu of their paycheck? Are there coins that they want to earn? etc. There are great projects out there that have compelling systems to incentivize spending—three that come to mind (that we’re excited about) are Dai, Eco, and Terra.

Messari: Are you currently working on an online payment option?

Trevor: Yes

Messari: and related to that - Will we see fiat onramp so consumers that only own fiat can use the fast and efficient flexa network? Or will you keep catering only to crypto consumers?

Trevor: I think this highlights a really important reason we think Flexa is better than the legacy payment infrastructure. Almost every transaction that takes place today is digital in some form or another, but the problem is that the accounts we use to pay were designed in a pre-internet era (e.g., credit cards invented in 1940s vs. ARPAnet in the 1970s). So, the majority of payments today are trying to jam an analog payment instrument into the digital context. Crypto fixes that—for the first time, we can send digital transaction signatures securely through a digital rail.

So, will Flexa offer a fiat on-ramp? No. But we’re definitely not preventing wallets from offering a fiat on-ramp and then enabling secure and fraud-free spending through our rails.

The combination of fiat on-ramp and merchant off-ramp is where we think digital assets start to go mainstream. We’re focused on solving the latter side of that particular chicken-and-egg problem

Messari: That makes a lot of sense.

Switching gears lets get into some questions around staking. First up, we had some questions around the roadmap

Why is the staking delayed past the beginning of October that was previously communicated in Flexa Announcements?

Trevor: We’re on track with the staking roadmap. Our dApp is live on testnet and we’ve been getting great feedback from our testers over the past couple of weeks; we’ve completed a security assessment/audit for our contracts with the fine folks at Trail of Bits; and our mainnet launch is coming Soon

As a quick sidenote, anyone who’s interested in helping us test the dApp and contracts can get some text FXC and join the staking testnet (just request an invite in the @flexacoin community group). We’ll be pushing some major UI updates live within the next few days, and our testers have been instrumental in helping us smooth out the rough edges of the dApp.

Messari: What yearly return could we expect from staking?

Trevor: The network reward is obviously based on a variety of factors, but… assuming that one percent of each transaction goes to the stake pool, it will really depend on the amount of spending volume that flows through the network. We’ve run a bunch of models, and the results can get really interesting even with a small amount of FXC staked and a small set of wallets on Flexa. Honestly, we’ll have to see what happens!

Messari: Alright, I want to finish up with a couple of questions related to staking in that they are about token supply.

Will the team commit to staking their released vested Flexa tokens?

Why did the circulating supply increase with 320M on September 1 and October 1 and with 3-4B on August 1

Trevor: First of all, the Flexa team is absolutely excited to stake FXC and use the network. As for the supply increases, all of the monthly increases are pretty thoroughly described in our “Introducing Flexacoin” post from April

Messari: Great! Everyone be sure to read the post.

Thank you @trevf for joining us and before we sign off tell everyone where they can find out more about Flexa.

Trevor: Yes—aside from our Messari registry profile of course, the best place to learn about Flexa is our website or our blog . We spend a lot of time and effort on our blog posts, and that’s probably the best place to start in terms of learning how we think about payments and why we’re building Flexa.

Separately, we have a really active Telegram community over at @flexacoin, and we post official announcements in @flexa and on Twitter