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LazerPay the Nigerian startup, building an online payment process for cryptocurrency launched in beta in October 2021. And it gave early access to 500 businesses and creators in Africa. Before the beta launch last year, LazerPay received an undisclosed amount of investment from Nestcoin, an innovative venture that builds, operates, and invests in products making crypto accessible to everyone. An increasing number of people are now holding crypto assets and the next best step is to make it possible for people to perform transactions with them.

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Many businesses are working hard to make it easier to use cryptocurrencies as one will do with fiat money, such as investing, trading to everyday payments. Despite the progress, many common businesses particularly in Africa still struggle to incorporate crypto services into their platforms. This limits businesses to a whole world of potential customers with high purchasing power. For example, traditional businesses will need to set up a wallet address on a crypto exchange, accept payments from limited types of crypto, and then work peer-to-peer hurdles to exchange their crypto for fiat money (normal currency like naira).

Alternatively, they can use someone’s wallet address and give the person a part of the money for converting it to fiat money on their behalf. Both ways come with challenges that are both complex and cause businesses to lose cash to fraudsters. Lazerpay was then born as an infrastructure that digests these complexities and helps businesses accept crypto payments easily and securely.

Lazerpay, co-founded by Emmanuel Njoku, Abdulfatai Suleiman, and Prosper Ubi was launched in October 2021. The startup’s reception to the tech space has been massive. During its beta phase, the crypto startup was endorsed by several techs and blockchain enthusiasts as an important innovation needed to advance the adoption of cryptocurrency in Africa. It is more remarkable that the startup’s chief executive officer is a 19-year-old, who seemed to have emerged from nowhere to become one of the most sought-after young tech favourites in Africa. His story is a very interesting one because he dropped out of university where he was studying engineering to code permanently, a decision that did not go well with his parents. He worked at several places such as quiva games, project hydro, xend finance, MakerDAO, and instadapp. In his interview with the tech cabal, He told them how he got a contract offer of $3,000 per week from Avarta, a blockchain security company based in Singapore. He joined them and built their entire blockchain infrastructure. Then he met Yele Bademosi, founder and CEO at Nestcoin, who would later become one of Lazerpay’s early investors. Bademosi then became his mentor, so when he wanted to start Nestcoin, Njoku was one of the first engineers he reached out to. It was around this time that the idea to build Lazerpay began to form. Njoku dropped everything to focus on Lazerpay. Avarta reached out with a full-time offer of $7,000 per month and $50,000 worth of Avarta token, but he rejected it. They came back with another offer of $15,000 per month, but Njoku was running with his new vision. Before, his vision was to become a great engineer, but now it’s to become a great founder.

Lazerpsy works like Stripe (an online payment platform), but for cryptocurrency. With the platform, businesses can use either of these channels to accept crypto payments from their customers:

  1. Integrate a collections widget in their apps.
  2. Collect payments through a link.
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Both options support payment with any type of cryptocurrency without any limits. In essence, any company using LazerPay can receive payments from anywhere in the world by integrating or creating links to start accepting payments. On settlements, all payments are converted into stable coins into the client’s LazerPay wallet. Stable coins are the equivalent of cryptocurrencies in an existing fiat currency but are more stable than regular crypto. The choice of converting to stable coins is to protect clients from volatility(rise and fall of cryptocurrency). From there, clients can now choose to withdraw into their crypto wallets or directly into a bank account of their choice. LazerPay also offers a growth fund and a token system. 

The growth fund: This places amounts approved by business owners in algorithmic managed decentralized finance (Defi) investments to earn beyond average returns (up to 10% per annum).

The Lazerpay tokens are similar to any regular currency and gain value based on activities carried out on the platform. Besides empowering members of its business community to make controlling decisions, LazerPay aims to use these tokens to provide liquidity that businesses can use as rewards for their customers.

With LazerPay, the complexity of setting up a structure to accept crypto payments is handled entirely by the startup. So as a business owner, you only need to set up your business on LazerPay and choose to integrate or collect payments through your branded payment links.

Featured Image Source: Bitcoinwiki
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This article was first published on 2nd March 2022

ikenna-nwachukwu

Ikenna Nwachukwu holds a bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He loves to look at the world through multiple lenses- economic, political, religious and philosophical- and to write about what he observes in a witty, yet reflective style.

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