Startup Spotlight: TxPay Is On A Mission To Enable Easy Web3 Payments In The UAE (And The Rest Of The World) txPay aims to be committed to developing fintech solutions that enable direct credit card and/or fiat money payment towards any kind of smart contract.
By Aalia Mehreen Ahmed Edited by Aby Sam Thomas
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This article is part of an ongoing series covering startups that have been a part of the Mohammed Bin Rashid Innovation Fund (MBRIF) accelerator program.
Buying non-fungible tokens (NFTs) with fiat money may have not become commonplace yet, but Dubai-based startup txPay is on a mission to achieve just that. "txPay provides a turnkey payment infrastructure solution that enables direct credit card payments towards any kind of smart contract and seamless settlement of digital assets and services," explains Stefano Gaspari, co-founder and CEO of txPay. "Smart contracts and blockchain enable the next revolution in the software industry. Today, such technologies have not yet been mass adopted by the public due to its complicated nature. We acknowledge the future of such technology, and we are committed to developing fintech solutions that facilitate and accelerate public access to it."
If you find your brows furrowing slightly while reading this, let me attempt to explain the technologies at play here. In the world of Web3, smart contracts are simply programs stored on a blockchain that run when predetermined requirements are met. Now, NFTs are digital assets that are powered through smart contracts- information regarding ownership and NFT transaction are stored on a smart contract. The txPay platform, which was launched in December 2021, thus offers users access to any type of smart contract, and supports payments that use over 95 fiat currencies, and over 150 cryptocurrencies. "The txPay unique selling proposition is to provide a one-step automated 'smart-ramping' process, which permits anyone to purchase any type of smart contract service with fiat money in a few seconds," Gaspari adds. "Our business model is based on three elements. The first is to provide an intuitive and seamless access to anyone to any type of Web3 services (value proposition). The second involves leveraging a strategic partnership with a major licensed payment gateway and on a proprietary application program interface (value creation). And finally, the txPay model focuses on generating revenues with a fee model based on a pay-per-transaction scheme on the user side, and a pay-per-subscription scheme on the Web3 merchant side (value capturing)."
With such an approach, Gaspari hopes that txPay can prove to be the bridge that connects Web3 payments to the rest of the world. "Even though innovation plays a big role for txPay to ensure that our products have the most up-to-date performance and security standards, the core of our activities is to keep and consolidate the relationship with the users of our solution and with the Web3 merchants, to consolidate and enhance the level of credibility txPay has in the crypto payments industry," he adds.
Now, Gaspari's vision, of course, could not have found a better place to come to fruition than the crypto-friendly city of Dubai. "The main benefits we got operating in Dubai are derived from the fact that the Emirate has created an environment where it's possible to participate in big events of the crypto industry, and it's possible to get special attention from government acceleration programs such as the MBRIF program," Gaspari notes. "The main challenges are mostly linked to the fact that the local ecosystem of Web3 projects is still in the early-stage phase, and it's difficult to find local partners that can help you in your growth process."
But helping txPay in navigating such hurdles is the MBRIF program. In addition to fine-tuning txPay's go-to-market strategy, the initiative has also enabled better connections for his startup, says Gaspari. "We chose to join the acceleration program of MBRIF for several reasons, but mainly because we wanted to get support in implementing our go-to-market strategy, and also gain facilitated access to specific services in the UAE such as banking services and legal services," Gaspari adds. "We also hope to leverage on the important network of investors that MBRIF can access." Having already completed a pre-seed funding round, txPay is now in what Gaspari calls a scale-up phase. "The company has already a mature product ready to be scaled on the market," he says. "The objective now is to scale the business and to expand the team from 5-6 employees to 25-30 employees, and to prepare the upcoming seed round with venture capital firms." It may have been operational for only just a year, but txPay is clearly dreaming big for the future. Onward and upward!
