A Huge Rev-Share Opportunity in How We Pay for Web3 Services

NOTE: This story first appeared on my Ministry of Alpha account on Substack on Sept. 2, 2022. This has been updated accordingly where necessary.

First, you’re going to yawn. Then you’re going to perk up. But the perking up comes later in this dispatch.

Here at the outset, I will tell you that this is the story about payment-processing systems. Like I said, a real yawner, at least superficially. Specifically, this is a story about Hel.io, or Helio, a Web3 company that will soon unleash its 10,000-strong Helions NFT collection onto the Solana blockchain

Helio’s Helions minted in late September at 3 SOL. Today, they’re trading at 5.7. And they will go much higher in time as the team builds out Helio’s payment-processing services, which are already being used.

Helio is setting out to become the Stripe of Web3, the leader in blockchain-based payments for everything from e-commerce to subscriptions, to payments that happen right inside of Discord … oh, and maybe even for porn. See? Now you’re perking up.

Aiming to become the “fill in the blank” of Web3 is a pretty common aspiration these days in the NFT space, and aiming to become a leading payment processor is an exceptionally heavy lift, given that meaningful competition will certainly exist in this arena. And for good reason: There’s big money at the end of this particular rainbow.

Stripe last year processed more than $640 billion in payments, generating revenue of about $12 billion. PayPal racked up more than $25 billion in revenue last year on $1.25 trillion in payment volume. Throw in Visa, MasterCard, American Express, China’s Union Pay, Japan’s JCB card, and various other credit cards, and transaction volume globally is in the hundreds of billions annually, while dollar volume is several trillion.

Web3 promises to be exponentially larger than Web2, which means the payments flowing through Web3 are going to be monumental in scale. Meaning the income opportunities are going to be monumental in scale. Meaning that lots of players are going to be sticking their straws into this pot to taste their share of the rainbow.

But if any company can step up and take a bite out of this ginormous apple…