As the cryptocurrency industry continues to grow, the needed access and tools to build for the industry have become increasingly important. More people need to find it easier to start crypto-based businesses and transact in crypto, just like with current traditional financial services.
Payourse is a crypto company focused on tackling those hurdles and making crypto accessible to all and sundry. They do this by building the right infrastructure to integrate crypto into everyday life. Founded in September 2019 by Bashir Aminu, John Anisere and Hakeem Orewole, Payourse is building solutions to curb the problem of accessibility in web3 and foster the adoption of the new technology.
The company is highly involved in creating the infrastructure and tools that will enable Africans to build user-friendly crypto and web3 products. They have a variety of products including a payment gateway, wallets-as-a-service and a crypto ramp.
Coinprofile
Payourse started as Coinprofile, a social app that makes it easy for users to receive and use their crypto. The app helps you send crypto and instantly withdraw it in your local currency, anywhere in the world.
The web app, which is now one of the product offerings under the Payourse brand, started out as a platform that collects wallet addresses and generates shareable links just like Cash App or Venmo. After some success, the founders realised that they could make this product into a more powerful tool.
While building Coinprofile, the company realised that they faced a lot of difficulties setting up the infrastructure for crypto payments. This led to them building other products.
According to Tosin Amusan, the product lead of the company, “When we started Coinprofile, it was hard to find the right infrastructure for our products because most people didn’t build for web 3.
We had to integrate a lot of external partners. It was quite expensive for us and didn’t make a lot of business sense. We had to start building the rails to empower more functions and that’s what led to other products like our payment gateway and wallet as a service.”
Improved Utility
While Coinprofile made it easy to receive payments in crypto and convert to instant cash, there were still some limitations to that function; some users would prefer to spend as crypto rather than convert it to cash.
The company learnt this and started offering virtual USD cards to allow users to do more than receive payments; also pay for subscriptions with your account and easily move crypto to their cards for spending.
Solving the P2P struggle for Nigerians with BinancePay
Despite building for the world, Payourse has always tried to solve problems that are most prevalent to Africans. After the ban on crypto transactions in Nigeria, crypto users found it very difficult to buy and sell crypto.
Most of them resorted to the peer-to-peer feature on Binance but even that had its risks. There have been multiple complaints of people getting scammed, sending money and not getting any crypto.
Payourse is trying to solve this problem by introducing BinancePay; a feature that helps users move money from their Coinprofile straight to Binance and the company said,
“Instead of going through the risk of P2P, comparing prices and finding sellers, you can easily connect your Binance account to your Coinprofile account and transact seamlessly. You can hold that money in dollars or convert it to Naira easily. That has made it faster for our users to use and spend their crypto.”
Simpa: Shopify For Crypto Exchanges
This is another product in the Payourse portfolio.
According to Amusan, Simpa can be simply described as “Shopify for crypto exchanges.” Simpa is built to serve crypto sellers who sell to other users, peer-to-peer transactions, via social media and other channels.
Simpa allows them to quickly create an online store dedicated to their crypto business. The company takes the manual and cumbersome process of selling crypto where the seller always has to be online to confirm transactions and makes it easier by providing an online platform
where anyone can just click on the personalised link, buy crypto and leave without any direct communication with the buyer. With a waitlist of users across multiple countries, Simpa will solve a pressing need for small businesses in the Web3 ecosystem.
Functionality and User Experience
Payourse strongly believes in simplistic user experience and trustworthy outcomes. The company makes its product easy to use for crypto newbies and beginners. They also pride themselves in making functional products that work and actually improve the lives of users.
According to the company “Users want crypto to work for them. They don’t need to know or care how it works as long as their money comes to them. A lot of our users are Africans in the diaspora that use Coinprofile to send money and local freelancers that use it to collect payments. They don’t necessarily care about crypto but the product works for them.”
Crypto, Art, and Community
The digital art scene in Nigeria has been very pivotal to the use and spread of Coinprofile. The company held an event in August 2022 to recognize their thriving community in Nigeria with the theme, “Live your best life with crypto.”
Users could meet team members, ask questions about the product and just connect with other artists and people.
Next Steps and Future
Payourse plans to go global and expand across Africa and help more companies across the world in their mission to make it easier for people to use crypto.
It will be interesting to see how much change Payourse brings to the crypto market with its focus on user-friendly products and functional infrastructure. The company’s easy-to-use approach is definitely a refreshing one and should be adopted by many crypto companies including the big(ger) names.
