Debit, Credit Cards, Bank Accounts Coming to Uniswap

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Uniswap Labs is get­ting into the fiat game. 

The devel­op­ers behind decen­tral­ized cryp­toas­set exchange Uniswap have struck a deal with Moon­Pay to bridge DeFi and con­ven­tion­al cur­ren­cies. The part­ner­ship allows Uniswap users to buy dig­i­tal assets via a bank account or sup­port­ed cred­it or deb­it card, the com­pa­nies said Tuesday. 

The arrange­ment is designed to resolve a long­stand­ing issue for DEX users: Peer-to-peer blockchain pro­to­cols do not sup­port fiat pairs. Cen­tral­ized exchanges, such as Coin­base and Krak­en, do. 

Moon­Pay, a dig­i­tal assets infra­struc­ture and pay­ments proces­sor, is han­dling the back-end of the arrange­ment, which allows cus­tomers in more than 160 coun­tries to pur­chase cryp­to via direct bank trans­fers, as well as cred­it and deb­it cards. 

Terms of the deal and the exact time­line of the roll­out were not disclosed. 

The move, once more, pits Uniswap against its cen­tral­ized coun­ter­parts: Coin­base, for instance, has an option to con­vert assets to the sta­ble­coin USDC and then with­draw for free. 

Uniswap rep­re­sen­ta­tives in a state­ment dubbed their fees as the “best rates in [Web3]” and “the low­est pro­cess­ing fees on the mar­ket.” The DEX is not plan­ning to take a cut of the spread on USDC trans­ac­tions, but pro­cess­ing fees do apply, a spokesper­son said. The lat­ter typ­i­cal­ly ranges from 1% to 3%, depend­ing on the pay­ment method. (Cred­it card pur­chas­es would come with a greater cost, for instance.)

Insti­tu­tion­al and retail cryp­to traders alike have late­ly been reex­am­in­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty — and fea­si­bil­i­ty — of safe­guard­ing cryp­to on exchanges fol­low­ing FTX’s liq­uid­i­ty crunch and ensu­ing bank­rupt­cy. And the notion appears to be one part of the mar­ket­ing pitch for the partnership. 

MC Lad­er, Uniswap Labs’ chief oper­at­ing offi­cer, told Block­works that “user expe­ri­ence has been a major bar­ri­er to adop­tion of decen­tral­ized tech, and improv­ing that is a pri­or­i­ty for Uniswap.” App users main­tain cus­tody of their funds. 

“The more users can do in self-cus­tody and on decen­tral­ized rails, the bet­ter and safer their expe­ri­ence can be,” Lad­er said in a statement. 

Sup­port­ed blockchains include Arbi­trum, Ethereum’s main­net, Opti­mism and Poly­gon. Sup­port­ed tokens at launch: DAI, ETH, MATIC, USDC, USDT, WBTC and WETH. Min­i­mum pur­chas­es are typ­i­cal­ly the local cur­ren­cy equiv­a­lent of $15. 

Avail­abil­i­ty for the pur­chase of each indi­vid­ual cryp­tocur­ren­cy depends on where the cus­tomer in ques­tion is based, and sim­i­lar restric­tions apply to sup­port for bank account trans­fers — ver­sus using a deb­it card. Pur­chas­es of cryp­tocur­ren­cies with fiat are also sub­ject to MoonPay’s know-your-cus­tomer (KYC) require­ments, which like­wise vary by region. 

MoonPay-Uniswap integration is all about choice, the companies say

For many DeFi adher­ents, the idea of hav­ing to pro­vide per­son­al­ly iden­ti­fi­able infor­ma­tion in order to acquire dig­i­tal assets is anti­thet­i­cal to the idea of DeFi itself: a trust­less, per­mis­sion­less means to freely exchange val­ue around the world, at any time. 

Uniswap said Moon­Pay would not share any user data with the DEX. 

Zee­shan Fer­oz, MoonPay’s chief strat­e­gy offi­cer, told Block­works that there’s a “very clear line” in terms of Uniswap’s func­tion as a decen­tral­ized enti­ty and his company’s role as a pay­ment proces­sor, which he dubbed “decou­pling the tech stack.” 

“The idea is to pro­vide a robust tech stack, pro­vide option­al­i­ty in terms of pay­ment meth­ods that also pro­vide dif­fer­ent price points,” Fer­oz said. “The idea is to pro­vide choice.” 

There are no cryp­to offramps at the moment, with the com­pa­nies say­ing an addi­tion is some­thing they could pur­sue down the line. It’s the lat­est instance of a grow­ing num­ber of fiat onramps, though, for acquir­ing dig­i­tal assets with real-world mon­ey. Users, instead, have to use Moon­Pay, or anoth­er third-par­ty facil­i­ta­tor, to exchange their dig­i­tal assets for fiat.

Meta­Mask, which already has its own Uniswap inte­gra­tion, now sup­ports pur­chas­es via Pay­Pal with­in its own mobile app; pay­ment pro­cess­ing giant Stripe now allows cus­tomers to swap dol­lars for dig­i­tal assets; and Kado, a pay­ment proces­sor that focus­es, specif­i­cal­ly, on Web3 appli­ca­tions, has set up its own fiat mech­a­nism on the Cos­mos blockchain.


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