pull down to refresh
231 sats \ 6 replies \ @IamSINGLE 2 Jan \ on: Pierre Corbin - Founder of Flash AMA AMA
Where are your services available? What are your plans about expanding your business in South East Asia, especially in India?
Our services are already available pretty much anywhere. We are a non-custodial solution. Which means we facilitate peer-to-peer payments and not for a single second do we hold user funds. So regulations are not a problem (at least at this stage). We'll see how things evolve. Basically you can already use Flash in India if you want! Feel free to reach out to us, we can help you get onboarded!
We will soon be addind support for more currencies (visually, we only use lightning of course) to help user onboarding. We want to make payments easy and to the same standard as companies like Stripe. The difference is that since we're non-custodial, you can get started and monetize in 2 min, literally. No need for KYC or anything like this
reply
The KYC is a big problem here. The government doesn't let us buy or sell Bitcoin without it. The government taxes 31% actually for any profits you make with Bitcoin and any sats you recieve as gifts.
I don't know how does flash work but people here are t ready to accept Bitcoin payments for goods or services because everyone thinks that it's kind of illegal to accept Bitcoin.
Does flash change Bitcoin to USD in real time?
reply
Oh yes, I actually heard already that the government is pretty agressive against bitcoin in India :/
Are these taxes on top of the typical taxes you have to pay for business sales? Unfortunately, it might not be interesting for local payments just yet, but it might be an option for selling abroad. Maybe products can be charged for at a premium, allowing the cost of taxes being less felt at the end of the day. In the end, governments change and all of this will be legal. And when it does change, it will be all of a sudden. Being early is great. That's part of the reason why we made Flash free to setup. We only charge a fee after the merchant earns.
We do not currently provide btc to usd in real time. We do want to provide such services, but only through partnerships. The moment we are the ones to do this, we will have to start KYCing our users and other issues can follow for merchants. We want to stay as far away as possible from that, and need to find the right partnerships + integrations to solve for this.
reply
Thanks.
I don't know how the taxation would be for business sales because it's not clear from whatever rules the government has mentioned and I've never come accross a merchant, not even in the biggest cities, who can tell me how these work.
The rules only mention that there's a flat 30% + 1% TDS applies to profits made through virtual digital assets. The rules also mention than VDAs aren't currency and they can't be used as legal tender, I assume this means "can't be used as MoE.
reply
Hmm yeah that's pretty bad indeed, and definitely lacks clarity. We plan on doing research around local laws around the world for accepting bitcoin payments and managing accounting + taxes. Look out for that, as we want to release it in Q1 :) I hope we'll be able to answer these questions for a lot of people!
reply
Thanks. I'll curiously wait for the release.
Until then I'm also looking for the clarity on these. If I'll meet one merchant, I'll update you.
reply