SendCrypto is a simple tool for initiating direct financial transactions which places emphasis on cryptocurrency payments as a preferred primary means of payment. It handles the programmatic aspects of educating and onboarding users and initiating transactions, including about the value of L2 chains, and supports multiple chains, to help ease especially the L2 user experience both for payment senders and recipients.

Today, there is a fair amount of work involved for any party who wants to accept cryptocurrency in donations or as payment for goods or services. SendCrypto drastically reduces that amount of work, offering permissionless infrastructure improving the web3 user experience for simple payments and requests, without re-intermediating into the value chain or taking a cut of each transaction.

Though displaying a public address is sufficient to facilitate cryptocurrency donations from power users of the technology, prompting a transaction involves a fair number of steps that are not necessarily simple or intuitive. Because even slight increases in the cognitive burdens associated with a donation process tend to reduce the number of donations received (especially from small donors), large nonprofits tend to expend a lot of effort trying to make that process as simple as possible. For example, charities often add one or more easy donation buttons (often suggesting specific amounts to reduce even the cognitive burden of thinking of an amount) to their webpages and e-mails, minimizing the number of steps/clicks needed to complete the donation process.

Setting up these buttons/links can be relatively easy using traditional payment rails that require payment senders and recipients to provide personal data to centralized third party payment processors who take a cut of each transaction. For example, PayPal lets accountholders set up links of the form paypal.me/yourname or paypal.me/yourname/25, where the optional numeric parameter on the end specifies the amount of the payment (here, in USD). SendCrypto makes it much easier to do something similar for blockchain payments.

For power users of blockchain technology willing to invest more time into programming a button that makes cryptocurrency donations easier, it is readily feasible but not trivial to write code for initiating a transaction and awaiting confirmation to update a UI, especially when accounting for the complexities of wallet detection and connection, asset detection and/or conversion, or walking new users through installing a wallet, figuring out where they can acquire cryptocurrency, and educating them on the lower-transaction-cost (++) benefits and how-to of using an L2 network for their payments. This programming task on the recipient side is not trivial, easy to get wrong, and generally not related to the core mission-supporting activities that potential recipients are skilled in and/or want to be focusing their time on.

SendCrypto allows all that effort to be concentrated in one project that can be easily reused in many others, making construction of an easy donation link (or QR code) as easy as constructing a PayPal.me link: all you need is the address where you want funds to be received, and optionally the amount, with additional options for L2 networks and more advanced applications. In the future, recipients will be able to denominate the amount they want to receive in a wide variety of common accounting units, including government-issued currencies like USD, EUR, CAD, COP, JPY, etc. and also specify assets and chains where they would like those funds to be received, even if that is not an exact match for the sender’s holdings. Additional feature development is also planned to support specification of other native asset names and non-native asset names (e.g. USDC instead of ETH); current plans are to support a possibly arbitrarily-broad range of ERC20 and other relevant standard tokens.

This project makes it easier for payment recipients to accept cryptocurrency as a form of payment, which increases the utility of cryptocurrency and can accelerate user adoption of web3 technologies, including for applications beyond cryptocurrency payments (as users grow more familiar with how to use the technology and have wallets already installed/set up). This also provides strong direct utility to projects already in the Ethereum ecosystem who might wish to receive support using cryptocurrency technology, but who might feel they have to revert to primarily traditional payment systems and/or invest a lot in onboarding + user education + transaction initiation programming which is not a good match for their skill set or mission/interest.

With further development, recipients will also be able to specify details for other methods of donation or payment that can be used for credit cards, bank transfers, mailed checks, or even physical locations for cash delivery, allowing them to use the same donation link for all potential payers without strictly requiring that all their supporters adopt cryptocurrency. The link target’s emphasis on cryptocurrency payments will help normalize the idea of using this technology for making payments, communicating additional utility of the technology beyond what the visitor may have previously perceived and adding one point to the social-proof environment that can help motivate future adoption of web3 technologies.

The initial motivating example for this project comes from non-profit donations, which helps call attention to the ecosystem’s emphasis on novel mechanisms for funding public goods. That emphasis can help divert some attention away from the get-rich-quick scams that many people strongly associate with the ecosystem today, replacing the scam story with one about funding public goods and supporting other causes potential users care about.

Use of this technology is not limited to non-profit donations. An invoice for goods and services (e.g. a restaurant check, professional services bill, etc.) could have a SendCrypto link or QR code printed at the bottom which specifies the amount of the payment. This link/code could also optionally encode other parameters set by the recipient useful for connecting a particular blockchain-payment transaction to automatically mark the invoice paid, with attention to adequate confirmation or finality. (Payment recipients also appreciate the added financial confidence associated with having fewer unknowns around future credit card chargebacks.)

This would provide customers with a convenient alternative payment method and could reduce required human-interaction steps (e.g. staff bringing over a terminal or keying in credit card details, accepting cash and delivering change, reading one’s address and other personal details off a check, etc.) which helps reduce staffing costs/time-burdens, increases customer convenience (e.g. a restaurant customer in a rush not having to wait until they can get a server’s attention at a busy time), and reduces some frictions associated with those interactions, especially for members of discriminated-against populations who may be less likely to engage in such transactions due to concerns about microaggressions and other mental/emotional taxes of interacting in environments lacking fuller acceptance of diversity.

Here are some example links demonstrating the current functionality for sending a transaction on various networks: Mainnet, Polygon, Optimism, Aurora, Cronos, & SKALE. ENS names instead of addresses are also supported for improved link readability, including a note to users when the reverse resolution for an address may differ from the address specified in the link (e.g. when one address holds multiple names and uses a secondary one in payment links).   This project won the SKALE Network grand prize at ETHGlobal 2022 because of the extent to which it facilitated simple transactions on that network, previously made more complicated and less probable due to problems with network discovery (i.e. users becoming aware of the network’s existence as an Ethereum-native alternative with no gas fees) and connection (you couldn’t even connect to it from Chainlist.org, often requiring manual addition of technical parameters). SendCrypto also makes it easier to learn more about L2 networks.

However, the project is far from complete, and progress has been much slower than desired due to needing to prioritize work on funded projects, within a certified minority woman-owned small business. Your support can help put it into the funded category, supporting delivery of additional features and more of the potential shared value of this project being realized. It would also financially justify the application of a permissive open-source license (Apache intended) to old and new work, further aiding the realization of its shared potential value.

Some additional planned features include a widget to simplify link construction (for non-programmers) and embeddability into other websites (for programmers), packaged into React and other frameworks for ease of recipient use. Integration with a service for easily translating SendCrypto links to QR codes will follow. Custom subdomains (e.g. yourname.eth.sendcrypto.money/25 and/or donate.yourorganization.org), visually flagging contract addresses, better user education with improvements around L2 asset-bridge links, incorporation of other naming services, integration with charity directories, notifications, project-internal infrastructure improvements, better ability to customize the page where you are a recipient, and much more are all planned. Your support through this funding round can help make progress on that roadmap!