Publishing case studies strictly on BTCPay and the cannabis industry

Strainly, a cannabis seed and services company, has teamed up with BTCPay to release a case study on the use of BTCPay to facilitate payment processing in underserved and blacklisted industries.

One of the most important use cases for Bitcoin is what many users say is using certain privacy wallets “to make transactions you don’t want to make.” Censorship resistance. Financial institutions, and indirectly governments, exert significant influence on society and the economy through the coercive influence they exert over those institutions, through their ability to deny people access to financial services and their ability to trade in markets deemed unacceptable. retains control.

The cannabis industry has been notorious for its struggles in that regard since it first became a legal business at the state level in the United States. Major banks do not allow cannabis businesses to hold accounts, most payment processors do not offer the service and you either have to deal with cash only or have to deal with payment processors with very high prices, which can put you off immediately.

Strainly is a company that has been serving this industry since 2016, providing seeds of cannabis varieties, cultivation equipment, plant cloning, pollen for propagation, and other services. By the way, although all these products are also legal at the federal level in the United States, the companies that provide them are still subject to financial exclusion.

As a result, Strainly has pioneered the use of BTCPay servers as a payment processing solution for vendors in this industry. After using their own service for a long time, they decided to make their integration public to promote a P2P market among their own users. Leveraging BTCPay servers on the backend, you can provide servers to vendors to register their own non-custodial wallets for payment processing and to use Bitcoin as a payment mechanism for other participants in the legal cannabis industry. BTCPay’s pooled payment system supports seamless refund functionality for suppliers and customers, while protecting suppliers from chargebacks inherent in traditional financial systems. It also facilitates payments between customers and suppliers in a way that neither party’s personal financial information is exposed to the other party.

In return for operating the infrastructure to enable this market, Strainly collects a small fee from each exchange. After initial testing where buyers would pay this fee on top of their supplier invoices, they found that this arrangement created a high level of friction for marketplace buyers, many of whom were investing in Bitcoin before using it. I had no experience with it. In response, we reorganized the user flow to require vendors to pay marketplace service fees, leaving buyers with a single invoice for vendor costs and shipping costs.

This change significantly reduces friction for end users who have no previous experience using Bitcoin. Strainly currently processes 600 to 800 invoices per month, with a settlement rate of 80% for generated invoices. This kind of success rate clearly shows that they are doing something right when it comes to making Bitcoin simple and intuitive for regular people to use. This case study is a perfect demonstration of how Bitcoin can function as a designed censorship-resistant payment infrastructure. The full case study can be downloaded here.