Hi there Stackers,
I am Ray Marceau, CEO of Purse.io. Thanks for joining this AMA discussion, I am looking forward to this as it's my first one!
A little about me, well I just got back from two weeks in the desert at Burning Man. I went out early to help set up the city and break it down. My son even came for a few days! Another activity I have a passion for is rock climbing. I joined Purse in 2018 where I helped lead technical development, and I took over as CEO in April 2021.
Purse launched in 2014, being one of the first companies ever to make buying products with Bitcoin possible. We enable people to buy any product on Amazon with Bitcoin at a 5-33% discount. We have 200k+ users who have saved over $4.4 million dollars in total.
I’m excited to share that we released our Lightning Network integration recently, so you have access to purchase discounted Amazon products using Lightning! I was fortunate to have worked with Lightning Labs over the past year and learned much about integrating lightning with a huge e-commerce platform.
Besides Purse’s marketplace, our developers have also been contributing to open source development for Bitcoin over the past 8 years. Purse’s platform is built on Bcoin, which is a NodeJS implementation of Bitcoin. We believe that having codebases in different programming languages is crucial for Bitcoin to be more antifragile, so our developers were the first to release a NodeJS implementation (Bcoin), and a C implementation (Mako) is being worked on now.
Our motto since 2014 has been to Make Bitcoin Useful, and we’ve never been more excited about the future of Bitcoin as we are now!
The AMA will start on Tuesday (September 13th) at 10am (CT). Feel free to ask me anything!
Ray Marceau, CEO of Purse is here! If you need to buy something, the answer is clear Why pay the full price? Cut it like a shear I just rhyme and stack like it's my career
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Can you explain your businss model? How do you make money?
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Great question! As one of the oldest Bitcoin utility companies, we do make money besides just hodling Bitcoin! We charge a service fee that’s based on the discount requested (ranges from 1.9-4.7%). For 10% discount or less, Purse charges Shoppers a 1.9% flat fee. With this revenue model, Purse requires a high volume for cost of goods sold.
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What convinced you that LN is needed? What percentage of purchases are LN at this early time?
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Lightning Network aligns with our motto perfectly of making Bitcoin useful. As we’re an ecommerce platform, our users have a huge need for low transaction fees. The Lightning Network is at the core for enabling Purse to continue to innovate. While Lightning transactions are a huge win, we also have other aspirations to remove the custodial nature of Purse. One month in, 20% of all transactions on Purse involve Lightning.
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Welcome! I have to say purse.io is really interesting concept. How many LN transactions have you seen so far made on Purse.io? What is the relationship between Purse.io and Bitcoin Cash? Does bcoin support Taproot - if not is it planned?
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We’ve answered about Bitcoin Cash elsewhere, but to keep it short, BCH is what our customers demanded when the fork occurred due to the low fees. If a strong majority of our userbase are Bitcoin and Lightning proponents, then we’ll reconsider the need for Bitcoin Cash. As far as transactions on Purse, 20% of all transactions have involved Lightning.
Taproot support is currently in review for Bcoin, here’s the Pull Request that will provide that support: https://github.com/bcoin-org/bcoin/pull/1063
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Nice! 20% of lightning seems a lot especially since you added it just recently.
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Lightning integration was a long awaited feature, so naturally our power users transitioned to it quickly after launching. It's still so new though, so we anticipate more users switching as it becomes more embedded into the ecosystem and more exchanges adopt lightning deposits/withdrawals
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I tried to use purse. Two things turned me off and I never tried it again.
  1. All of the Amazon items I needed were not available
  2. I saw that bitcoin cash was also accepted for payment.
Besides that i like to support bitcoin companies when I can but what is purse going to do to fix the top two issues?
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Thanks for the questions! We strive to support as many items as possible, and when an item is not available, we encourage our users to report the item which allows us to investigate it and provide support. We are normally very timely in responding to reported items. Here’s our support document regarding items we cannot support: https://support.purse.io/en/article/what-cant-i-buy-on-purse-unsupported-items-1dwpp6t/
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On Bitcoin Cash: our customers demanded low fees at the time, which is why we supported BCH payments up till now. With our recent Lightning integration, this makes Bitcoin extremely useful for our e-commerce platform. If a strong majority of Purse’s userbase uses Bitcoin and Lightning, then we’ll definitely reconsider having Bitcoin Cash. Help make this happen!
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There was some drama about Purse shutting down some months ago. What was that?
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Purse was founded in 2014, and our engineers have been very active with open-source development. We used Purse’s Marketplace as a vehicle for many of our improvements and contributions, whether it was the Bcoin implementation or creating Handshake.
We thought about shutting down the Marketplace to focus on these exciting projects, but our community feedback made us realize we miscalculated the Marketplace demand. That's when we begin reorganizing the company to focus exclusively on the marketplace while spinning out our other innovations as their own projects.
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Has Amazon ever tried to stop Purse from doing what it does?
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Amazon changes their system regularly, which sometimes makes it difficult for the Purse platform to interoperate with them. Our developers have to pay close attention in order to maintain compatibility with Amazon. With that said, Purse has never been directly targeted by Amazon since our platform went live 8 years ago.
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What convinced you to finally add lightning support? Can you share details on usage since adding it, ie has it been popular?
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We are friends with the Lightning Network creators and have been keeping a close eye on the network’s maturity throughout the years. After receiving thousands of requests to integrate Lightning and after vetting the technology as mature enough, we have finally done so and are grateful for the overwhelming support thus far! There has been a gradual shift from onchain transactions to Lightning since the August 10th launch. Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen Lightning involved with 20% of all transactions on Purse. The metrics show that Lightning usage is steadily increasing.
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What is the most important thing that you learned over the last 8 years since starting Purse?
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hodl Bitcoin 🤣... No but really, the ecosystem has evolved so much and the crypto space is constantly changing. But one things for sure is that everything revolves around Bitcoin and we've learned it will stand the test of time.
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I know it is more than a month late, but how is the use of lightning ongoing?
Are you seeing an increase of the use of purse.io because of lightning?
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The use of Lightning has been going great. Over 20% of all transactions have now been on Lightning. We also have had a lot of new users from the Lightning community that never shopped before we added Lightning support.
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Sound great!, do you plan to remove bitcoin cash on the future now that lightning is solving "high fee" issue for bitcoin?
Thank you very much for taking the time and reply
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At one point your website prominently displayed Bitcoin Cash. Can you speak to how your company picked sides during the blocksize wars? Have you changed sides? Is Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash the real bitcoin in your mind?
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Purse had two options when Bitcoin Cash forked in 2017. We could have kept the Bitcoin Cash for ourselves and cashed in like a lot of other companies did. Or, we could enable wallet support and deposit the Bitcoin Cash into the rightful owners’ accounts. We chose the latter and still believe that was the right thing to do for our customers. There was a period of time when BTC transactions were cost prohibitive for some of our Shoppers on Purse who operate on thin margins. Lightning’s low fees is a major reason why we’re so excited about the future of Bitcoin. Bitcoin = BTC
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Is Roger Ver still shareholder of the company?
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Roger was an early investor and is still a passive shareholder of Purse. We appreciate his help in getting Purse's mission out to the community. However, he has been inactive with us for some time now.
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Roger was an early investor and is still a passive shareholder of Purse. We appreciate his help in getting Purse's mission out to the community. However, he has been inactive with us for some time now.
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Alright, here to answer questions for the next few hours ⚡️
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