Airswift is a Web3 fintech company building a decentralized crypto payments platform built around the core goal of connecting merchants with Web3 payment acceptance solutions. It is designed to enable businesses to expand their acceptance of digital currencies and allow digital asset holders to make purchases seamlessly.
Airswift recently launched its centralized crypto payment gateway – Airswift Connect – and is expected to release one of the first decentralized crypto payment protocols next month. With a mission to connect businesses with customers from universe to metaverse, Airswift is ready to help merchants enter a thriving digital world.
In an interview with Dr. With Yan Zhang, Airswift’s CEO, we spoke about the decentralized payments protocol and its mission and vision, as well as Airswift’s pre-seed funding, new product launches, future roadmap and more.
1) What was the thought process behind the design of the Airswift products? Tell us about your mission and vision for Web3 payment platforms.
Exchange, payment and wealth management are the three cornerstones of the financial services world. While there are decentralized exchange and wealth management platforms, the industry lacks decentralized payment gateway products needed to transition from centralized to decentralized fintech infrastructure.
For example, centralized Gateways involve custody risk if the provider goes down, while this is not an issue with decentralized solutions. And unlike centralized gateways, decentralized payment protocols allow payments with any currency there is a market for. In addition, decentralized solutions reduce the costs and friction of cross-border payments.
There are two reasons people haven’t built a decentralized gateway yet. First, you need the right technology to implement data protection for on-chain transactions. Second, payments is a specialized industry with many regulatory requirements and meeting them is a challenge that requires an in-depth understanding of Web2 payment systems.
Our team overcomes these challenges by applying its expertise in both financial services and Web3 technologies. And while we are a Web3 payment protocol, our primary mission is to connect merchants with customers and bridge the gap between Web2 and Web3.
2) How have your crypto payment solutions evolved since their inception? Can you elaborate on the achievements and obstacles so far?
After starting operations in the summer of last year, we launched our key product – the crypto payment gateway – and attracted a few pilot customers for it, including payment service providers who want to integrate crypto solutions and small shops who want to accept crypto for various purposes. Some want to attract younger customers, while others want easy cross-border transactions.
We have also spent the past half year building our infrastructure and working hard on the payment gateway and processing solutions.
Our biggest hurdle is building connections between the web2 and web3 world as the regulators are extremely cautious at the moment and the overall market is tough. Therefore, we need to ensure that compliance managers in organizations are confident in our approach to handling the information and money flows for crypto transactions, which differ from those for traditional currency transactions.
3) Given certain restrictions in the crypto space, how is Airswfit responding to industry challenges?
The biggest challenge in the industry is the speed of innovation. The regulatory process lags behind innovation, so problems arise that we have to solve ourselves.
Airswift addresses this issue through transparency measures: Due to a lack of regulation, fraud occurs at centralized exchanges. But have you ever seen decentralized exchanges fail due to fraud? No, because everything is on-chain and transparent, meaning every transaction is auditable. Our decentralized payment protocol brings similar transparency – leaving no room for fraud for anyone.
The second major challenge for the industry is data protection. Without this, people will not want to export their trades to the blockchain. We’ve put a lot of effort into working with international standardization bodies like the W3C to ensure we’re on the same page when it comes to privacy.
4) What are the different characteristics of the decentralized payment protocol? How do they stand out from the rest?
First, the decentralized payment protocol relies on a liquidity pool, as access to crypto liquidity is necessary to facilitate the many sporadic money transfers required by merchants.
We build our liquidity pool together with all traders using our gateway. The pool generates interest for liquidity providers, which is risk-free as the liquidity contributions remain in the pool and do not result in a temporary loss.
We’re also fulfilling our mission to lower the cost of crypto payments for merchants and consumers. Crypto payments should be cheaper than fiat payments because many of the fees associated with fiat payments do not apply to crypto.
5) Tell us more about “Airswift Connect”, your centralized crypto payment gateway. How important is it to the crypto space?
The gateway is designed to make your crypto transactions – especially your e-commerce transactions – smooth. It can process crypto payments from e-wallets, credit cards, and gift cards.
To use Connect, you can integrate a plugin into your Woocommerce or Shopify backend. So, the gateway offers many advantages – it tries to make your life easier by letting you enjoy the low cost and high convenience of crypto transactions.
6) What role does your on/off ramp service play? How beneficial is it for users in the Web 3.0 world?
Smooth on-ramp and off-ramp transactions are very important because while bringing everyone to Web 3.0 is our mission, people still have to pay their bills in fiat. And since offramps are taxable events, we work with licensed crypto-to-fiat conversion partners while trying to make the process quick and cost-effective. For example, we offer T+0 off-ramp services at minimal cost.
7) What impact has Airswift’s recent pre-seed funding round had on its investors?
We are very selective when selecting our seed investors because while all investors are great, it is even better to attract investors who specialize in the area of your project. Our CEiC investors are highly specialized in fintech and come from one of the top ten fintech investment firms.
Our lead investors have given us a good market image, which has helped us attract interest from other investors. The temporary market isn’t great, so we like to announce other investments when market conditions change.
8) What community engagement activities are planned for Airswift users?
Airswift uses a B2B2C community engagement model: we partner with businesses to serve customers. Our approach to community growth differs from that taken by pure Web3 native projects and that is one of the reasons we speak to AMB Crypto – because we are more involved in the professional community.
But especially with our DeFi products, many consumers will get involved later. Airswift plans to launch its token sometime this year, allowing the general public to explore one of the first payments-based DeFi products.
9) What lies ahead on the Airswift roadmap? Tell us more about it.
Our decentralized payment protocol will be officially released in a month. Hopefully by the second quarter of this year we’ll have our first user-based setup for it. The task then is to build the size of our liquidity pools to best serve the industry.
Learn more about Airswift’s crypto payment solutions at https://airswift.io/.
Disclaimer: This is a paid post and should not be treated as news/advice.
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