Eleni Steinman from Loop on Crypto Autopay

[00:00:00] Umar: Welcome to The Accountant Quits, brought to you by the Web3CFO Club, a community by Request Finance. With a curated community of web3 CFOs from companies like Aave, the Sandbox, Binance, Consensys, Ledger, and many more, joining this club will allow you to network and learn best practices on web3 financial operations.

[00:00:24] Umar: On The Accountant Quits Podcast, we discuss how blockchain will impact the accounting professions and how accountants should prepare themselves for the future of work. My name is Umar, your host, and even if some might refer to me as the accountant gone rogue, my job is to provide you with the blockchain knowledge that you need that will be relevant for the accounting industry as a whole.

[00:00:47] Umar: Welcome to Episode 42.

[00:00:49] Umar: The autopay function is prevalent in TradFi. Think about all instances where payments are automated, like your subscriptions, loan repayment, salaries, utilities payment or credit card repayment. Having to manually approve such recurring payments would be a headache for you.

[00:01:09] Umar: Today in the web3 space projects having a subscription pricing model, have a tough time automating these recurring payments if they want to be paid in crypto. That’s because payments in crypto right now are push payments.

[00:01:23] Umar: One company who wants to enable automatic recurring crypto payments without locking up funds is Loop. With Loop, you can embed a simple payment link on your application, which allows your customers to pay their recurring subscriptions with no code required. Today I have the pleasure to be speaking with Loop’s co-founder and CEO Eleini Steinman.

[00:01:47] Umar: In this episode, you will learn the difference between push and pull payments, what is Loop and how it works, how can you integrate Loop to enable recurring payments with a simple payment link, how HR can run payroll without involving Multisig wallet owners, use cases for crypto autopay and much more.

[00:02:09] Umar: Eleini, welcome and thanks for making the time to be here.

[00:02:13] Eleni: Hi. Yeah, thanks for having me, very excited.

[00:02:16] Umar: To start, could you tell us a little bit more about your background, how you became interested with blockchain and the story of co-founding Loop?

[00:02:24] Eleni: Yeah, definitely. So I think I probably have a non-traditional background, which is I started my career at the federal government. So I used to work in trade finance in DC.

[00:02:35] Eleni: And you know, I actually really loved my job at the government, but I had an itch to move to the private sector and see what it was like to work in startups. And so I actually went to business school as a way of reframing myself from a financial regulator to being, you know, a small tech startup operator.

[00:02:55] Eleni: And it was in business school when I was looking into fintechs that I found the Bitcoin white paper and just became totally immersed in the technology. I distinctly remember having this light bulb go off of, is this what people mean when they say they have a passion for a thing? Because I just enjoyed learning about the technology so much.

[00:03:16] Eleni: And this was in 2016, 2017, and I, after graduation, I went, took a job at a crypto startup in, in Chicago that was focused on scalability. And there’s where I met my co-founder Shane. So he ran the dev team. I was on the business team and we had the, we had the opportunity to work on a project, just me and him.

[00:03:41] Eleni: Building out a token. And that’s when I realized like I enjoyed working with him. We worked really well together and I was sort of ready to go on and do the next thing. Of course, I, you know, decided that I wanted to do it with him, and so we actually quit. Without an idea, just as a team knowing we wanted to build something and we were very lucky to have Archetype back us with a pre-seed investment to give us that space to explore what problem we wanted to solve.

[00:04:10] Eleni: And in that exploration we reflected on our pastime in crypto to see, to try to find a problem that we thought was like big enough to solve. But also we personally, And so that’s how we came up with Loop. At this old company, they were accepting subscription payments. It’s a real headache. I’m sure we’ll go into why.

[00:04:30] Eleni: And Shane and I realized that it was an area that we could solve. And so we built Loop around that.

[00:04:36] Umar: Like I said in the introduction, transactions in web3 are push payments and not pull payments. So to give some context to the listeners on what autopay means, could you first tell us what is the difference between push and pull payments and maybe provide some examples on both?

[00:04:54] Eleni: Yeah, of course. So it’s probably easiest to start with how it works in web2, which is when you, you know, you go to buy a subscription, for the most part. You give your credit card or your debit card. So you’re authorizing that company to pull the payment from your wallet or you know from your payment, your payment method.

[00:05:13] Eleni: This works because there are agreements between payment processors and companies that allow them to access your funds and send it to the company. In crypto that doesn’t exist, right? Everything begins with the end user’s non-custodial wallet, and they have to approve a transaction. But you can imagine there are some transactions that users are comfortable and perhaps would even prefer to enable a recurring payment because they know they’re gonna want this thing over time.

[00:05:48] Eleni: And so what Loop does is we provide the rails to allow both companies and end users to approve recurring payments. So in essence, we’re turning what was a push technically into a pull.. And the way that works, it’s, the analogy is pretty similar except you’re using all the web3 things. So a wallet gives permission to a smart contract to pull a certain amount with a certain frequency.

[00:06:17] Eleni: and Loop provides not just the contract and APIs, but front ends to make that process simpler.

[00:06:24] Umar: Now, when I see a new tool or protocol in web3, I always try to visualize a situation of how this function would work without this tool. So for autopay, I wanna take the example for subscription right now without a product like Loop. Let’s say you have company A who has a monthly subscription pricing model, and they want to receive their payments in crypto.

[00:06:49] Umar: Probably right now, company A who does not have access to such an autopay function for their application would have to send an invoice every month to user A, and then user A has to manually sign and execute the transaction, which is, as you just described, a push payment. There are many tools for crypto payments right now, but the experience for autopay is currently broken.

[00:07:13] Umar: Could you tell us now what Loop is and your value proposition for automating recurring payments?

[00:07:19] Eleni: Yep, definitely. And I just wanna add one more thing to that flow of how company currently accepts payments , which you’re totally right, they have to generate a wallet address. They need to communicate that address to the end user who then initiates, a send and sends money to the wallet.

[00:07:39] Eleni: But then there’s sort of the follow up of that, which is the company now needs to go ask the end user, can you send me the transaction hash? Because they could have many customers sending money to that same wallet for the exact same amount. And they don’t know who it’s coming from, so they don’t know who to permission into their system and who to mark.

[00:07:59] Eleni: You know, what invoice as paid. And so there’s a lot of heads of finance and accounting teams that just spend hours reconciling transactions that are flowing in because there’s no metadata in a crypto transaction. The way Loop works is a company can deploy a Loop Smart contract, and then they can use our front end.

[00:08:20] Eleni: So that is something like a hosted checkout page. Just like Stripe has a URL that you can send to a customer or embed in an invoice, Loop has the same. When a customer goes to that url, they can connect their wallet and approve a transaction that allows the contract to spend on their behalf. And so this is the analogy between the web2 and the web3, where the end customer is giving authorization to that contract.

[00:08:48] Eleni: The benefit here, verse web2, is in web3, the end user actually controls how much authorization they are giving. So an end customer can say, hey, you can only spend up to a hundred dollars and that’s it. You can’t do that in web2, right? You give your credit card and like, that’s it. It’s gone into the ether. The next step on the company side is now they can start, you know, sending bills to that customer.

[00:09:13] Eleni: And they can either leverage Loop who will do what’s called the dunning process, so we’ll remind that customer that a payment is due. We’ll tell them what’s in their wallet and what they’ve authorized to alert them to if the transaction may not be executed because they don’t have enough money, or give them the ability to cancel if they no longer want that service.

[00:09:33] Eleni: If a transaction successfully goes through, that metadata that I talked about earlier is natively provided to the company, and that’s because Loop is actually the one that pays gas and we’re the one that initiates that transaction. So we don’t need to go track down a transaction hash because, well, we started it, right, so we can provide that transaction hash to the end company.

[00:09:57] Eleni: Attach it to an invoice number, tell you what customer got paid, provide you a web hook so that you can continue to give them access in your system. And we’re even going a step further where we’re working on partnerships with some accounting software like crypto accounting software, so that this information can natively flow into that software.

[00:10:19] Eleni: And you don’t need to now go back and tag and say it was for this subscription payment, you know, for this customer. And so really by sort of to summarize by being that payments rail that any application can build on top of a Loop is just doing it in terms of subscription, but we open the software up to any other payment or invoicing software.

[00:10:42] Eleni: We’re able to pull together the entire payments lifecycle in the way that like works for both companies and customers.

[00:10:50] Umar: I wanna speak a bit about the user experience. So people want a web2 product experience inside of a web3 product. So there’s the payer and the payee, the payer, as you said, it seems very simple.

[00:11:03] Umar: They have the payment link at checkout, and they’re gonna click that payment link and just like in web2, then they’ll have a recurring payment every month. I wanna speak more about the payee user experience. Could you provide us a walkthrough of them integrating Loop and what like certain features and access they will have?

[00:11:24] Eleni: Yeah, so Loop, we have a, we call a no code solution. So the first thing is we will deploy for a company, a smart contract. Right now that is like sort of a white glove service with Loop. But our vision in the future is that anyone can deploy a smart contract. Anyone can make the contract calls, so they don’t need to have the Loop front end, but if they do, they can then use Loops, what we call a company dashboard.

[00:11:51] Eleni: Again, this Stripe, or ChargeBee is probably the best analogy here. You can click a button and add a subscription plan, or you can do this via API calls. So if we can go through the no code route first, and then maybe I can talk about some ways that you can automate it. But you can literally come into our dashboard, click a button, create a subscription plan, tell us how often you want to collect on that plan.

[00:12:18] Eleni: What’s it for? You can add a price description. You can say free trial for the first week, and then we’ll bill you afterwards and we’ll auto-generate for you this checkout page, which will have, you know, a card that had those payment details that you just told us about, and then the functionality that the end customer needs to connect to that payment plan.

[00:12:40] Eleni: The other thing you tell us is, you know what token you wanna accept and you can accept any ERC20 token. We use an Oracle to convert from a dollar price to the token price at the time of payment. So you can price your subscription in dollars. You can say it’s a hundred dollars, but let’s say you wanna get paid in wrapped Bitcoin.

[00:13:04] Eleni: At the moment of payment, we’ll convert the hundred dollars into how much wrapped Bitcoin that is and charge the end customer that amount. When someone signs up, so we use web hooks to communicate with our end companies about activities that are happening on the contract. So if someone signs up to one of your checkout pages, we’ll send you a web hook. You can have it go straight into Slack if you want, or be ingested into an application that you’ve built, and we’ll also show you that customer on our company portal.

[00:13:35] Eleni: The, the checkout page is literally just receiving the authorization. You then need to tell us about what payment you want to accept. . And so, you know, we call those transfer requests, but again, you can use the Loop company dashboard. Click a button that just says invoice. You tell us who you’re charging, where the money is going.

[00:13:57] Eleni: It can be anywhere as long as it’s on the exact same chain. We don’t bridge how much you wanna charge them for and on what date. And so you could schedule these into the future and then you send that request to Loop. I’m sort of glossing over some security features that we have, but that’s the high level. If you want, you can also build an application that automates all of this, right?

[00:14:19] Eleni: So Loop provides an SDK and API endpoint, so that, and some sample code so that you could write a little application that says, look at what this subscription plan’s details are. When you receive the web hook that says someone has signed up, automatically generate that first invoice. There’s a free trial, maybe you automatically generate it for a pay date that sets seven days or whatever into the future and send it to Loop.

[00:14:47] Eleni: And when someone, when a transaction gets paid on chain, again, will tell you that it got paid in a web hook and your application can go and then generate the next invoice. So in functionality, it actually works very similar to a ChargeBee, but the payment rails are crypto on chain. I know this is a very long answer, but I wanna add one last point to the end, which I think is a cool feature of Loop, is that our belief is that at least in the short term, medium term, people are gonna live in this web2 world.

[00:15:20] Eleni: You know, you’re gonna have some customers that wanna pay you in dollars and some customers that want the rails to be crypto. And so we have built an integration with ChargeBee and are building, built one with Stripe as well, where you can use Fiat subscription management software as your front end, but choose Loop as your payment rails.

[00:15:42] Eleni: And again, it works very similarly except we will listen to webhooks from Chargebee. If someone pays on chain using API keys, we can mark that payment as paid within Chargebee and they can be your front end while Loop continues to be the payment processing rails.

[00:16:00] Umar: Wow. Okay. That’s amazing. So you’re saying users can now go on ChargeBee and pay in crypto and that is actually being processed in the backend through Loop?

[00:16:09] Eleni: Yeah, that’s right. It’s not, we’re actually, you know, chatting with the ChargeBee team and it’s not a perfect integration, like as we would want in the future, but it works actually like 98% of the way, right? Because ChargeBee doesn’t have a concept of a crypto payment, and so we can’t tell you in ChargeBee natively like you got paid in USDC.

[00:16:32] Eleni: But what we can do is if someone pays you, if someone uses a Loop checkout page, we can create that customer in charge before you. We can mark them as being a Loop customer. Then if an invoice is generated in ChargeBee, Loop can ingest that invoice, create the invoice in our system, process that transaction on chain, and then again go and tell ChargeBee, hey, this got paid. You know, generate the next invoice. And so, the two systems actually talk very well. There’s just some very small metadata that we sort of shove into ChargeBee that maybe one day will have its own field.

[00:17:09] Umar: But if I’m using ChargeBee’s front end, will I see I just got paid in crypto.

[00:17:15] Eleni: Yes, it’ll be marked as an off chain, like an an outside payment. We co-opted one of their payment fields that is not specifically called crypto, but indicates that you’re using an external payment processor, which is as Loop. And we’ll also attach in the notes like the transaction hash so that you can go and find that transaction on chain.

[00:17:37] Umar: I wanna stay a bit on the other features that you have regarding perhaps fixed subscription and usage based subscription. So you can have projects with different models. So a fixed pricing model or usage based model. Would Loop work with projects also having a usage based model?

[00:17:55] Eleni: Yeah, so we, I mean we really built Loop to be as flexible as possible so that, because when we were talking to customers, what we learned is that every company has a different, honestly, like a different use case and a different business model that they just want the payment processing functionality. And so as I described in how Loop works, we only react to invoices that we’ve heard about and you can send to Loop any invoice that you want, our belief is that the agreement is between you and the end customer. And you know, Loop is not here to get in the middle of your business. And so if you are running, let’s say, you’re doing a bunch of, your company that charges per API call, you can wait till the end of the month, calculate the amount of money that is due to you.

[00:18:42] Eleni: Loop doesn’t do those calculations for you, but we do plug into to systems that do that calculation. And then you figure out what they owe you and you tell Loop in that invoice request.

[00:18:53] Umar: You mentioned the dunning feature that Loop provides earlier. So regarding invoicing, again, businesses using crypto, they want to ensure that they’re compliant for auditing accounting requirements.

[00:19:05] Umar: So just having like a paper trail, uh, for their transactions. Could you tell us a little bit more about the invoicing and receipt feature that a user would have for every payment made through Loop?

[00:19:17] Eleni: Yeah. So again, in under the theme of Loop being flexible, companies can opt in and out of this. They don’t have to allow Loop to send, to send receipts and do the dunning process, but if they would like to. When someone signs up on their checkout page, Loop will send them, send the end customer an email, let them know what they’ve signed up for, provide to them the transaction hash as well, so they have clarity of what has happened.

[00:19:43] Eleni: And then before and a payment is to take place, Loop will notify the end customer. Just like you see in web2. You know, you probably get an email from your bank and say your credit card statement is about to get paid. We’ll notify the end customer and say, hey, don’t forget you signed up for this thing.

[00:20:00] Eleni: We’re gonna charge you on this date. And then, you know, the cool thing about web3 that doesn’t happen in web2 is we can alert both the customer and the company to if there’s an issue. So chargebacks are a really big thing in web2 because you have to wait till the moment of payment when you’ve actually charged their credit card, and then you find out everything didn’t work.

[00:20:21] Eleni: In crypto, you don’t have to do that. We can see the wallet that they signed up with and we can see the authorization that they’ve given Loop or they’ve given that Loop Smart contract and we’ll tell both parties, hey, looks like this transaction is not gonna succeed. You know, you might get canceled. And again, that flexibility, we leave it up to the end company to decide if they want Loop to continue to try to process that transaction.

[00:20:49] Eleni: You know, for three days, for five days in perpetuity, or if they wanna be harsh and sort of like cancel that customer right away. We also provide to the end customer what we call like loops customer portal, where they can go in and manage their subscription. So if they want to make that allowance zero, they can do that really simply on our front end.

[00:21:10] Eleni: Or if, you know, they wanna make sure that payment goes through and they wanna increase it, they can do that as well. And again, a differentiator between web2 and web3 is like, there are no hidden subscriptions here. You don’t find out like a year later that you actually had signed up to this thing that was charging you for the last year.

[00:21:28] Eleni: On Loop’s customer portal, we can show you all of your subscriptions that you can manage at any time. We really by like sort of live by this philosophy of transparency and of user control and believe that is beneficial to both the company and the end customer.

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[00:23:28] Umar: The other feature that I want to touch on is crypto to fiat or fiat to crypto.

[00:23:33] Umar: So let’s just say crypto to fiat, for example, where you would allow your user to pay in crypto, but then you would receive fiat in your bank account or vice versa. Is that something that you’re seeing being in demand or being requested from your users and does Loop current for this, perhaps with the integration with Stripe?

[00:23:54] Eleni: Yeah, so we we’re solely the crypto to crypto rails, but we do partner with other providers who can help you go from crypto to fiat. The biggest thing we see, honestly, is that to address. So when a company invoices and wants to charge a subscription, they just have that subscription go to a wallet that sits at an exchange account, and so then they can easily convert into fiat.

[00:24:21] Eleni: We’re not seeing a ton of customers paying in fiat and then settling in crypto because quite frankly, you’re gonna pay fiat. You just, the company would accept the fiat.

[00:24:33] Umar: Yeah, completely agree. The other topic now I wanna speak of is regarding the multisig coordination problem. So Loop’s value proposition when it comes to multisig transactions is to reduce the time taken for multisig wallet owners to approve a transaction..

[00:24:50] Umar: That means HR can run payroll without necessarily involving the Multisig key signers, just the same way that a web2 payroll provider like Gusto or ADP, prompts a business manager to confirm the run of payroll. Could you explain what this means once the autopay function has been turned on? .

[00:25:09] Eleni: Yeah. So as you described correctly, like for example, in web2, Loop, we connect our bank account to a payroll provider who then processes payroll every month. But in addition, I think there are two missing features here. One is, you know who controls access to your bank account, but then two is who is the decision maker on when someone should get paid and like, who are we paying?

[00:25:36] Eleni: And so that tends to be a manager. And the problem in web3 right now is you have these owners of the Multisig wallet who have to approve every single transaction, but they might actually not be the decision maker of where the money should go and on what time. And if you use Loop, it’s again, it’s the same sort of payment rails.

[00:25:58] Eleni: The Multisig can provide authorization to a smart contract and say, this contract is able to, you know, withdraw a certain amount. So, you know, a great example is like dYdX DAO is using Loop at the moment and they. Perhaps they go to Tally, they have a vote. They say, you know, our Q1 spending is gonna be, I’m just making up numbers, you know, $50,000 to these five guilds over the next, you know, three months cuz it’s the Q1 spending.

[00:26:28] Eleni: Normally what would happen is the, you know, five of eight, let’s say at Multisig owners, every single month, will have to queue up one transaction for every single person that wants to get paid. So if you’re paying, you know, 10 people a month, that could be 30 transactions that you’re coordinating across five people.

[00:26:46] Eleni: So it’s like 150 signatures. It’s a time suck, right? And the people, like I said, who are coordinating those signatures, might not even be the ones who are involved in deciding where the money should go and who it should go to. And so a DAO can use Loop to permission the smart contract, let’s say for the whole quarter.

[00:27:08] Eleni: They could just say, we permission Loop $50,000. And then the manager can come into a front end, be it Loop or like I said, we integrate with apps. So you could be like, Mesha for example, is a front end that allows web3 companies to pay their employees so any front end can leverage the Loop protocol.

[00:27:29] Eleni: So you can come into a front end and go through a managerial process, right? We’re gonna pay this wallet this amount. You send it to the next person in the chain, they can say, yes, I approve. These are all web2 approvals. And then eventually that invoice gets the Loop and it says, hey, good to go. We’re gonna pay these eight, you know, these eight contributors.

[00:27:51] Eleni: And the multisig owners didn’t have to get involved at all because they’d already given that permission preemptively. So, does that make sense? I know there’s a lot happening there, but the, the core is the same. It’s the Loop payment processing enables the detangling of the multisig giving the approval from the managerial approval, which is just how companies actually operate.

[00:28:14] Umar: Just to summarize it, the Multisig wallet owners will give the approval at the start of the recurring transaction, and they won’t have to do it every time a payment goes through the same payment goes.

[00:28:27] Eleni: That’s right. Yeah.

[00:28:29] Umar: Going on to the use cases for autopay, so like I mentioned in the intro, some of the popular use cases, of course, subscriptions, loan repayment, donations, credit card repayments.

[00:28:41] Umar: There’s a lot of use cases, of course that we have in web2, which we can replicate in web3. But I want to ask you, what are the use cases more likely that we can see very soon in web3. And if you could mention a few use cases that your clients are working on at the moment.

[00:28:59] Eleni: Yeah, so I think the two biggest ones are the ones we just talked about.

[00:29:02] Eleni: So a great customer of ours is lithium.ventures. They’re using Loop to accept subscription payment. , they’re using us. So Loop is on four different chains. We’re on Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Binance. We’re adding more as customers ask for us. So for example, Lithium had asked us to be on Binance and we deployed there.

[00:29:24] Eleni: And so they use Loop just like you would use a Fiat subscription provider. They send their hosted checkout page to end customers. And you know, they’ve had a few customers now that have done second and third payments through Loop and we’ve just automatically processed those for them. And then again, another example that we chatted about is DAOs are using Loop natively to schedule payments.

[00:29:48] Eleni: There’s a few DAOs that have used Loop to schedule payments several months into the future. Another feature that I didn’t discuss, but one of these DAOs is using Loop for is we can provide sort of like a view only view of our company dashboard so that if you wanted to share those scheduled payments with your community, , you can do that.

[00:30:09] Eleni: A third topic that we didn’t chat about, but I think will be pretty big is actually like buy now, pay later NFT loans. So we’re chatting with a couple of companies like Halliday, like Parcel, like Cyan, that allow investors or traders to per purchase NFTs, honestly, with a loan. So you pay a small amount now.

[00:30:34] Eleni: You pay a little bit more in the future, and so you pay off the loan over time and on both sides, both the purchaser of the N of the N F T as well as the receiver. Have a really strong vested interest for those payments to get made on time because if you miss a payment you could end up losing the NFT .

[00:30:51] Eleni: And so something I’m excited about is natively embedding Loop to allow for that auto pay so that the end purchaser doesn’t actually, you know, end up in a situation just because they forgot to pay. It’s very akin to like paying your rent on autopay.

[00:31:09] Umar: In terms of protection then for the payee, how would they ensure that the payer would actually pay them over over the remaining course?

[00:31:18] Eleni: Okay. Yeah. Some of these buy now pay later, they all have different models. Some of them are collateralized, often they’re collateralized by the NFT itself. So if you miss a payment, you lose the end customer or the end purchaser doesn’t get the NFT, and they’ve sort of lost those initial payments they’ve made.

[00:31:37] Eleni: So there’s a very strong interest to make sure you pay on time so you don’t lose the NFT. We actually see it a lot like for gaming. They’re like in-game assets, so perhaps you wanna buy, you know, some sword on credit because you can use that NFT to produce revenues and then he can use those revenues to pay off the loan.

[00:31:59] Umar: Wow, I wanna ask you regarding the barriers that you’re currently seeing for adoption. So for Loop, what are some of the biggest challenges for adoption? It could be anything, regulation, education, for the users, communication.

[00:32:15] Eleni: Yeah. I think one is probably around like education of how much control the end user has.

[00:32:20] Eleni: I’m always sort of shocked when people don’t know about the allowance function. It’s not, it’s not something Loop invented. It’s native to the ERC20 token, and it doesn’t sit in our contract. It sits on the token contract. And I think people don’t realize every time they go to Uniswap or Compound or SushiSwap.

[00:32:40] Eleni: They’re giving an allowance and unfortunately often they’re giving an unlimited allowance, which means that contract can take all the money related to an ERC20 token from you. Loop we try to make it like front and center and easily manage just how much allowance you’re giving our contract, because in my opinion, you know, that’s the killer feature of crypto is the end user control.

[00:33:08] Eleni: So I would say there’s a lot of work around educating folks of what’s really happening in their wallet.

[00:33:15] Umar: Can I interrupt you? Yeah. Uh, because I didn’t ask you this question before, could you tell us what is a token allowance when it comes to Loop?

[00:33:23] Eleni: Yeah. So it’s no different than any other Dapp. So if you can remember the first time you used something like Uniswap.

[00:33:31] Eleni: The first transaction you always sign is this allowance function, which you’re basically telling the contract. You’re allowed to spend a specific token on my behalf, and within that function is a parameter that says how much and for ease, a lot of these applications make that how much, infinity. Because they don’t want you to have to go back and sign the transaction.

[00:33:57] Eleni: And Loop is making this choice to say, actually, we think it’s better if the end user has to go and sign this transaction more than once because they shouldn’t give, you know, sort of infinite ability to something. There should be a guardrail on it, and it should be clear to the end user, how much that guardrail is so you can make an informed decision.

[00:34:21] Eleni: And so again, it’s not, it’s not something that we develop, but it’s something that I think we are using in a clever way and are trying to sort of start conversations about how, how end users can use it too. Because it, it’s a killer feature of crypto that I think people, you know, just don’t think about.

[00:34:38] Umar: And regarding your roadmap, could you share some of the upcoming features and milestones that Loop has.

[00:34:45] Eleni: Yeah, so I mean some of these Fiat integrations are, I’m pretty excited about. Like I said, we finished the ChargeBee one, we’re for all practical purposes, almost done with one with Stripe. I think it’ll make using Loop and collecting fiat and Loop huge.

[00:35:01] Eleni: Another one is, are these integrations. We talked to a lot of companies that, like Lithium is a great example. They’re gonna use Integral, which is an accounting software to help them manage these transactions and we’re chatting with Integral and working on how can we, you know, do things like natively pull in the invoice number so that when a transaction shows up on chain, you know, we have a transaction hash, we can match it to the invoice number, and now you can match it to the item that they purchased.

[00:35:32] Eleni: And so perhaps the accounts payable that you had in your accounting system. , everything should just flow because the information is there. It just needs to be brought together. So I’m pretty excited about that. And then continuing to work with DAOs, like honestly, they’ve been so fun to work with. They, we’ve been chatting a lot with, uh, Coltron at ENS DAO, and he’s given us incredible feedback on how to make our run ends for paying for things a bit better.

[00:36:01] Eleni: We’ve been, and also chatting with, with, I think people think they’re competition to Loop, but I see them as more like compliments to Loop. So these payment providers like Request Network or like Coinshift, who can build on top of the Loop protocol and integrate with us, and I’m really excited about some of those integrations that will help make the Loop ecosystem even more valuable.

[00:36:24] Umar: For example, how could a protocol like Request build on Loop?

[00:36:28] Eleni: Yeah. So right now, I mean, they help you create an invoice. They’re good at that. You click a button. You can get, you know, a PDF or a link that says like, pay money here. But you could imagine maybe you click that button and then the pay money here, it actually goes to like Loop’s SDK.

[00:36:48] Eleni: So when someone connects their wallet to pay you under the hood, they’re actually signing up for autopay and, and of course on Request front end, they can let you know, you know, that you’re signing up for autopay. But they can leverage the smart contract and API functionality and connect it to their own front ends and enable that feature.

[00:37:10] Eleni: I think you get the point.

[00:37:11] Umar: Eleni, we coming to the end of the episode. Has there been, as closing thoughts, has there been anything else that you’d like to share to the listeners?

[00:37:19] Eleni: No, I guess that Loop we’re doing, like I said, this beta right now and if anyone is interested in using Loop or learning more about it, they can DM us on, uh, Twitter.

[00:37:30] Eleni: They can send us an email at hello@loopcrypto.xyz. They can email me directly. I’m eleni@loopcrypto.xyz. It’s very complicated. , but yeah.

[00:37:43] Umar: Perfect. There’s the last question, which I usually ask to my guests, which is, do you have a quote or maxim that you live by?

[00:37:50] Eleni: Yeah. I think running a company and you know, especially working in crypto these days can be a bit stressful and I always try to put things into perspective. You know, it is a true privilege to be able to help build out the crypto ecosystem and, you know, work with my team and if there’s a bug or there’s a banking crisis, , luckily we were okay, but you know, all be okay.

[00:38:16] Eleni: And it’s, it’s just sort of like reminding ourselves that for the most part, the issues are real and the stress is real, but we’ll probably be okay and I just try to keep everything in perspective.

[00:38:29] Umar: I love it. Eleni thanks a lot for coming today. Thanks a lot for your time and in preparing the episode, I really understood what I mean, we take it for granted, autopay in TradFi.

[00:38:42] Umar: It’s something that has been built over like so many years and in crypto this did not exist. But you guys at Loop, you guys have created this and I’m now extremely bullish on what you’re creating and it’s something. , a lot of projects need right now, so you are helping to put this puzzle back together.

[00:39:02] Eleni: Thank you. I appreciate that. I, I’ve been in crypto for a while and you know, just wanna help the ecosystem and build, build things that are solving real problems.

[00:39:11] Umar: Perfect. I already asked you, what’s the perfect way for people to reach out to you? If people want to learn more about Loop, where should they go?

[00:39:18] Eleni: Our website, loopcrypto.xyz. But honestly, you’re probably just best DMing us. We’re pretty responsive and you know, always happy to jump on a call and chat with people.

[00:39:30] Umar: Because right now you’re still in beta right now, so can people still join your beta program? Is it already closed and now they have to wait when your product goes live?

[00:39:40] Eleni: No, they can definitely join us. You know, just reach out and we’ll walk you through and you know, be honest and tell you if whoop is right for you or not.

[00:39:48] Umar: Perfect. Well thanks a lot for coming in today, Eleni.

[00:39:52] Eleni: Yeah. Thank you. This was a lot of fun

[00:39:53] Umar: We’ll speak soon.

[00:39:54] Umar: I would like to thank everyone for listening to this episode.

[00:39:57] Umar: You’ll find all the links of the episode, show notes and transcripts on the website of The Accountant Quits at theaccountantquits.com. Please note that this content is for general information purposes only and is not a substitute for consultation with professional advisors. If you do know anyone who could benefit from the episode and you care about them, please do share the episode with them.

[00:40:20] Umar: All the episodes are available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts, and by leaving us a review and rating, you will support the channel and all your fellow accountants. In order to be notified each time we release a new episode, do follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn. We hope to have you with us next time.

[00:40:40] Umar: Bye for now.