Gift card giant Raise partners with WalletConnect on crypto payments option

Raise, the company behind the popular gift card purchasing app, is starting to integrate crypto further into its platform. 

The firm has partnered with Wallet Connect to add support for a wide range of popular digital wallets — including MetaMask, Phantom and Coinbase Wallet — and begin accepting ETH, DOT, BTC and SOL tokens as well as USDC and USDT stablecoins as a form of payment. 

The company, founded in 2012, has over six million customers and direct partnerships with over 1,000 major retailers. It has facilitated over $10 billion in transactions through its consumer app, exchange and B2B operations.

“The plan is to expand rapidly into a bunch of other tokens and currencies into the future,” George Bousis, CEO of Raise, told The Block in a statement, adding that the firm expects a series of major blockchain-related announcements in the near future. “Our main focus was working with the bigger ones out the gate.”

Users will be able to import their non-custodial wallets directly into the Raise app to “pay for anything in real-time,” Bousis said. “So you can book an Uber ride with ETH, buy groceries using USDC or book an Airbnb using Bitcoin.”

Bousis said that at launch, these crypto transactions will not incur a fee due to arrangements struck with retailers and the fact that the costs associated with running crypto transactions pale in comparison to those of fraud management. 

“We're using the gift card rails that were directly integrated with all the retailers to spin up a gift card at the time of purchase via crypto,” Bousis said. The product has been live for a select group of users during A/B testing, and has received positive feedback.

Bousis said the firm will promote the new crypto payment options in-app through banners and placements. “This is something we're really excited about and we think it could drive more liquidity into our ecosystem — we're going to rapidly expand into on the B2B side as well,” he added.

Raise is also working directly with crypto foundations and protocols to run specific promotions to offer users additional cashback whenever the native token is used. For instance, if users integrate their Polkadot Pay app, they can earn up to 20% cash back on purchases in DOT.

The plan is to spread its crypto payment option to 30 countries by the end of the year. 

Earlier experiments

In the early days of the firm, Bousis said he had experimented with building on Bitcoin, but found the blockchain to be too slow and expensive. The same issue came up again following the initial launch of Ethereum in 2015, which sparked Bousis’ interest in smart contracts. 

“The gift card space today sees a trillion dollars of transactions a year, so from a TPS standpoint and an infra standpoint, it just wasn't possible. We had basically shelved a lot of the stuff that we were working on just because the technical shortfalls that existed,” Bousis said.

However, today, the technology has caught up with the times. Without going into too much detail, Bousis noted the firm has been building a private-public hybrid blockchain to move much of its gift cards and store credits business onchain. 

“That will give retailers ultimate control and visibility into everything from customer data to an actual relationship with the end user,” Bousis said. He added that blockchain’s transparency can potentially mitigate fraud, bad actors and noise from the industry. “There are a lot of rent seekers that sit between brands and consumers,” he said. 

In particular, Bousis is keen on the programmability of smart contracts, which can offer certain users certain rebates or deals depending on factors such as the weather. He cited the example of AMC potentially offering a discount to users when it rains, knowing that adverse weather typically slows down business. 

Indeed, retail payments are arguably crypto’s first use cases, and so far, more has been promised than delivered — beginning with Satoshi’s original vision for Bitcoin as “P2P cash.” 

“My belief is the only way we're going to get mass crypto adoption is when people are using it without realizing that they're using crypto rails or blockchain-based technologies,” Bousis said.