SCF #7
COINQVEST - Enterprise Payment Processing
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COINQVEST helps online merchants and e-commerce shops programmatically accept and settle payments in digital currencies while staying compliant.

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COINQVEST provides digital currency checkouts that automatically go from Bitcoin (or any asset or stablecoin on the Stellar Network) to an online merchant's bank account (or crypto wallet), in minutes. COINQVEST helps merchants programmatically accept and settle payments in new digital currencies while staying compliant, keeping their accountants and tax authorities happy.

With COINQVEST, sales can be denominated and settled in a merchant's local fiat currency (e.g. EUR, USD or NGN) regardless of whether their customers pay in Bitcoin, Ether, or assets and stablecoins on the Stellar Network.

Watch our video to see how we do this.

Update: February, 9th, 2021; COINQVEST is now a licensed and regulated virtual currency services provider in the EU.

Goals

COINQVEST’s mission is to lower the payment barrier for the world’s merchants to join the global economy through simple digital payment processing. We process sales safely and efficiently for online merchants of all sizes and origins. Think of it as Stripe for crypto.

Features

Key Features
Real-time Currency Conversion and Instant Transaction Settlement

Customers choose from a list of cryptocurrencies to submit payment. COINQVEST automatically exchanges/converts payment into the seller's desired currency. Funds are deposited in the merchant's wallet or account. Once a payment is executed, settlement takes only seconds.

Risk-Free Transactions

Transactions take place on the Stellar Network — they are exchanged, tracked, and viewable immediately with transparency. Inter-currency fluctuation is minimized and there is no risk of non-payment.

Compliant Accounting

COINQVEST’s business toolkit includes analytics and tax-keeping data to keep enterprises tuned-in and compliant. It pinpoints effective strategies or revenue leaks, and equips businesses with automated invoicing and financial reporting.

Easy Integration for Developers

It provides two integration methods for an enterprise’s current setup. Our hosted checkout option is as simple as placing our checkout button on a website’s payment page. Advanced uses employ COINQVEST’s REST API, which allows our service to mesh with their online business.

COINQVEST & Stellar

Benefits of COINQVEST for the Stellar Network

How COINQVEST uses Stellar
  • works closely with Stellar cryptocurrency anchors to enable native payments on numerous blockchains
  • integrates with Stellar fiat anchors to deposit merchants' funds in their bank accounts
  • makes heavy use of strict-receive and the new strict-send path payment operations
  • monitors currency prices on the SDEX and initiates conversions in real-time
  • takes advantage of Stellar’s unparalleled architecture to add anchors in no time, thus able to roll out into new markets

Recent Progress and Achievements

Overview of progress since May 2020, when COINQVEST won the 4th round of the Stellar Community Fund. The platform went live in April 2020.

Platform Usage in 2020
Registered Merchants
Graph 1: Merchant Registrations in 2020 (updated April 29th)
Payments & Trades
Graph 2: DEX Payments & Trades in 2020 (accumulated)
Checkout Currencies
Graph 3: Checkout Currencies used by Customers
Settlement Currencies
Graph 4: Settlement Currencies selected by Merchants
Product Updates
  • Hardened the payment engine, including refund processing and solid exception handling (underpaid checkouts, overpaid checkouts, missing memo, multiple deposits, etc.).
  • Integrated anchors for Brazilian Real (nTokens) and Argentine Peso (AnClap) (coming soon).
  • Deployed UI-based invoicing and ad-hoc payment requests
  • Added internationalization of the checkout page, currently available languages are English, German, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish.
  • Developed shopping cart plugins for WordPress, WooCommerce, Shopfiy and Magento.
  • Released SDKs for PHP, Ruby, and NodeJS.
Settlement Currencies
Settlement Currencies
Organization
  • Incorporated a new legal entity in Estonia (COINQVEST OÜ) and applied for the European crypto license (fiat and crypto custody and exchange) issued by the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) of Estonia. Although a time-consuming and expensive process, it is an important step for COINQVEST to be regulated by a financial authority. It will increase trust and help facilitate merchant communication and adoption.
  • The EU incorporation and licensing application has been funded with a portion of our previous SCF award.

Marketing and Sales
  • Signed up 200+ online merchants with no advertising costs. Focused on content marketing via blog and social media.
  • Started a PR campaign in cooperation with Cowrie to create initial awareness among Nigerian merchants.
  • Established a structured B2B lead-generation process and approached merchants in Nigeria, Netherlands, Italy, Poland, and Ireland.
  • Participated as panel speakers at Meridian 2020 and other podcasts and publications.

The Team

The Team

Financial Situation

Funding Sources
Table 1: Funding Sources
Proceeds
Table 2: Use of Proceeds 2019-2020*

* (Difference between Funding 92k USD and Use of Proceeds 125k USD is due to XLM price increase in Nov/Dec 2020.)

Proceeds
Table 3: Use of Proceeds 2021-2022

Financial Gap and Sources
  • Current financial gap for 2021-2022: 290,000 USD
  • Target: COINQVEST hopes to receive a grant from the SCF Seed Fund to help achieve next milestones

Vision & Next Milestones

For the past two years, COINQVEST has been almost 100% focused on product development. Today, we are very confident to have developed a real-world solution that works flawlessly and is scalable for the future. Looking forward, 2021 will be a year continuing to develop functionality to the platform, but also on focusing on increasing user adoption. The vision for 2022 and beyond is to establish COINQVEST as a strong player in the international digital payments category that is mentioned alongside Stripe and PayPal.

EU Crypto-Exchange and Custody License

Update: February, 9th, 2021; COINQVEST is now a licensed and regulated virtual currency services provider in the EU.

Obtaining a European crypto license (custody license and exchange license) issued by the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) of Estonia will be a cornerstone of COINQVEST’s viability. The license should spur and facilitate business development with major partners and merchants. The expected date of issuance of the license is Jan/Feb 2021.

Product

Looking forward, major tasks will be the continued work with anchors to create seamless withdrawal and KYC processes, and localization and internationalization of the platform so merchants and developers can interact with COINQVEST in their native language. We plan to support marketplace providers by enabling payouts to multiple sub-vendors, and add analytics and report functionality. In the long run we're looking to facilitate global payroll and payout disbursements.

Human Resources

Key to the success of COINQVEST is a strong and dedicated team. We plan to stay slim and remote. However, if the situation necessitates, we will build the team by adding developers, B2B marketing specialists /growth hackers, and account managers.

Sales and Marketing

Update: April, 29th, 2021; We are working with an international remittance company on facilitating crypto-fiat and fiat-crypto transfers on their platform. The integration is in progress and we'll be able to talk publicly about it shortly.

To increase user adoption, we need to boost marketing, sales efforts, and tactics. On the online marketing side, our focus will remain on creating great content in various languages to help improve SEO rankings. Also, working closer with media outlets outside the crypto space may increase PR reach. We could test small paid ad campaigns on Google and Linkedin, although this will not be a focus.


In terms of business development, we plan to be more active in approaching cooperating partners and merchants, and intensify our B2B demand generation activities.

Market Size & Business Outlook

Worldwide E-commerce revenue is expected to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2020-2025) of 7.4%, resulting in a projected market volume of US$3,4 trillion by 2025.

Market Size

Key Takeaways
  • Evolving markets have the highest growth rates but relatively small market size
  • Developed markets come with lower growth rates but larger markets and higher expenditures per tx per user
  • East Asia (China, Japan, S.Korea) accounts for 90% of the whole Asian region

Business Opportunity for COINQVEST

General market trends like mainstream Bitcoin use (e.g. Paypal), increases in crypto prices, and more users holding crypto in their wallets, requires use cases for people to spend the crypto they hold. This creates more and more awareness among merchants to add crypto payment methods to their checkout processes.

Growing crypto adoption rates from merchants and consumers, in combination with e-commerce growth rates, provide a solid and promising business basis for COINQVEST for the coming years.

COINQVEST's revenue model is based on a low 0-1% fee per checkout (https://www.coinqvest.com/en/pricing). It's a classic SaaS model with revenue that scales alongside traffic growth.

Competitor Landscape

Among blockchain-based payment companies, COINQVEST has the highest scalability potential to roll-out its payment service into new countries and fiat currencies due to its modular integration approach with Stellar anchors.

Competitor Landscape

BitPay

  • 1 billion USD transaction volume in 2019, reported 10% growth in Q1 2020
  • represents about 0.2% of US e-commerce volume in 2020

Coinbase Commerce

  • reported 135 million USD transaction volume in 2019
  • tightly knit with exchange accounts

Gallery/Screenshots

Hosted and API Level Checkouts
Hosted and API Checkouts

Easy and Compliant Billing

Easy and Compliant Billing

Transaction Records and Accounting

Transaction Records and Accounting

Instant Withdrawals

Instant Withdrawals

Well Documented Rest API

Well Documented Rest API

Expandable Connectivity

Expandable Connectivity

Real-Time API Logging

Real-Time API Logging

Developer-Friendly Implementation

Developer-Friendly Implementation

Compliant Invoicing

Compliant Invoicing

Customer Management

Customer Management

Built-In Exception Handling

Built-In Exception Handling

Simple Refund Mechanisms

Simple Refund Mechanisms

Contact Us

We’d love to hear your feedback and are always in AMA mode. Connect with us on our public Keybase channel @coinqvest.public or chat directly with @marcinx or @xiaohu

Links

Website: https://www.coinqvest.com

Blog: https://www.coinqvest.com/en/blog

API Docs: https://www.coinqvest.com/en/api-docs

Twitter: https://twitter.com/coinqvest

Keybase: https://keybase.io/team/coinqvest.public

GitHub: https://github.com/coinqvest

Demo Shop: https://demo.coinqvest.com

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