Quote from: delong on September 19, 2016, 05:06:00 PM

Just wondering if there's anything new to report? Waiting patiently, of course, but would love to know what's in the works...

Hey Delong,
Yeah, so here's the current state of things. Going all the way back to the original launch of BitSeeds back in April of 2015, the project had coin.co lined up to handle merchant services/payment processing and handling the small fee that gives merchants a tax deduction for a charitable donation.

Since then the Bitlicense went into effect in New York (where coin.co is located) and between that and the other state-by-state regulatory requirements, the up-front cost for coin.co to be able to provide payment processing for crypto apparently shot up into the $2-3 million range(!) and so coin.co basically decided to largely stop operations. Back in June I was told about this, but also told that due to the charity status of the project this created a regulatory loophole and Bitseeds support was still on track and that we'd be ready to have merchants accepting orders in XSEED in about a month.

Fast forward to late July, as I posted upthread, Alex from coin.co hadn't had a chance to start working on it due to a family illness, but was still planning on it. When I spoke with him I asked him to confirm the "loophole" (for lack of a better term) with his lawyers. Eventually we heard that his lawyers had decided that the charity status was not enough to allow them to avoid the massive regulatory cost so coin.co wouldn't be able to do it.

However, coin.co has a complete payment processing system set up that is basically turnkey and ready for a company to take over to implement payment processing for bitcoin, Bitseeds, or other alts. Alex reached out to someone he thought might want to take over coin.co's assets, but they weren't apparently interested in providing payment processing along with their existing crypto business.

So we're at a point where we do have confirmed interested businesses who want to start accepting BitSeeds, but without coin.co there's no way for them to do so. So we are not able to go forward in the planned sequence (payment processing -> merchants -> gift cards & Rainforest Foundation) so we're hoping to move forward on the gift cards in the mean time so the RF can begin giving BitSeeds in exchange for donations and pick up the payment processor later.

I know some people who might be interested in working with us to implement the payment processing since they're already working on a multi-crypto project involving debit cards and merchant services, so I'm going to get in touch with them and see what they say. It's pretty likely they'll be happy to work with us so I'm going to get in touch with them and will get back with more info when I have it.

Sorry for the delays and I really apologize for getting excited back in June and tweeting about the news before I should have. The way it was presented to me was that it was all on track and just a matter of a few weeks before merchants would be able to accept BitSeeds, so I figured I'd let everyone know since people (including myself!) had been waiting so long. We do have merchants lined up, but obviously without coin.co's help it's a bit of a setback.

Anyway, that's the current state of things and I'll post more when I have something to report.