Last week, a video went viral: Tether’s CEO, Paolo Ardoino & Co-founder and CEO of Circle, Jeremy Allaire, posted on X showing IShowSpeed, the world's biggest streamer, paying for earrings in Nigeria using USDT & USDC.
Obviously, it became viral real quick and rightfully so - maybe we’re one more step closer to taking crypto payment mainstream?
Don’t mean to be a party pooper, I swear! But the most immediate thing that came to my mind was - was that transaction actually compliant?
From my POV? Probably not. His earrings cost $1,500, and what we saw looked like a P2P transfer straight to the shop owner's personal wallet - no sender verification, no audit trail (at least none of that from what I can observe through the video). At that amount, FATF's Travel Rule would normally require compliant VASPs to collect and transmit originator and beneficiary information. A casual wallet-to-wallet transfer bypasses all of that. Which means the merchant could end up holding funds from a sanctioned wallet, face enforcement action, or lose their banking relationships entirely, with no way to have known.
The Distinction That Matters
There's a critical difference between a P2P transfer and a payment. Same technology, fundamentally different regulatory treatment.
When you send USDT to a friend's wallet, that's peer-to-peer. Two individuals, no intermediary, generally outside regulatory scope.
When a merchant accepts crypto for goods or services? That's payment processing. It triggers Travel Rule requirements, AML obligations, and in many jurisdictions, money transmission licensing.
The IShowSpeed video looked like easy, seamless experience. But here's what didn't happen: the merchant had no way to verify the sender's identity, no ability to screen for sanctioned wallets, and no compliance infrastructure to satisfy regulators asking questions later.
Why I’m Bringing This Up
Crypto payments are at an inflection point. Stablecoin volume is exploding—over $30 trillion moved in the past year. 150M+ wallets hold stablecoins. The demand to spend is real.
But "scan address and send" won't scale. It exposes merchants to funds from potentially sanctioned sources. It creates liability without audit trails. And it's exactly the kind of activity regulators worldwide are now specifically targeting.
The FATF's 2025 update made this clear: jurisdictions are tightening VASP oversight, and enforcement is accelerating. The EU's TFR is fully operational. Nigeria is actively building its licensing framework. The window for informal crypto payments is closing.
Building Payments That Actually Scale
I’m not bringing this up with a pessimistic outlook; in fact, the opposite! We certainly have the chance to grow crypto payments. We just need to build the right infrastructure to scale.
WalletConnect Pay was built for exactly this - seamless + compliant payments by default. A quick TLDR of how things work here:
- Travel Rule compliance: Required user information is captured seamlessly within the flow—secure, GDPR-compliant, and built in so it doesn't feel like friction.
- Sanction screening: Wallet addresses are collected upfront, so merchants aren't left exposed to funds from flagged sources.
- PSP & Merchant ready by design: Fits directly into existing compliance frameworks - same reporting, same audit trails, same operational workflows.
All of this happens before payment is collected. By the time funds move, compliance is already handled, so PSPs and merchants don't have to build or maintain any of it.
For users, it's an optimized one-time flow that takes about two minutes. After that, paying is as seamless as what IShowSpeed did - scan, confirm, done. For merchants, it shows up like any other payment method: unified, familiar, and compliant by design.
The viral moment showed us where crypto payments are headed. The opportunity is real. We just need to build it right, and that's exactly what we're doing.
If you're curious to learn more, reach out, and I’ll be happy to chat things through!