CTSI Community
Why an independent business owner accepts CTSI
How a fishing supply business helps their community to enter blockchain.
Who are the CTSI holders holding the network up? From independent business owners to futurists, we’re excited to shine the spotlight on a diverse range of people you might be surprised to find in the blockchain space. This week we have an independent business owner, Louie Rohrer of Louie’s Lures, a fishing supply company based in Illinois, US. Chatting to Louie, we explore how he first joined the Cartesi community, and why he’s not just holding, but also accepting CTSI as payment.
Louie’s background is in hospitality and marketing, previously working for game owners and developers to form close and active communities within the gaming space. In 2015, while working on a separate project, he asked himself, “What company can I make that is impactful?”, coming up with Louie’s Lures. Combining a passion for fishing and community building, Team Louie is a fishing team with a purpose. Not just focused on making money, the team goes out regularly to clean local shorelines and preserve the sport for future generations. “Fish were much bigger 20 years ago and now much smaller. Some also harvest as food for their family., but that only works if we keep the waters clean and if we don’t overfish.”
I’m very curious about your journey into blockchain. From fishing to Cartesi — how did that come about?
Right from the beginning, we formed a community around the business which attracted a lot of people and generated a lot of growth for us. We’re not just here to sell commercial lures, we also work with woodworkers and support small American businesses that hand-craft lures, as well as partnering with people who share the same values to co-schedule events such as community clean-ups, maintenance, etc. We’re a big family, with 9,300 team members around the nation — and that makes us completely different from other lure companies in the USA.
So what drew me to Cartesi was the overwhelmingly active community on channels such as Telegram. Unlike other communities within the crypto space, the Cartesi community is dedicated to supporting and building the Cartesi ecosystem. To me, it was similar to our very own, Team Louie Fishing. Our team members are a family of passionate anglers that want to help grow our community as well as increase the effectiveness of our initiatives in the fishing space.
It’s great to hear that a shared importance on community brought you into Cartesi. How did you begin to accept CTSI as payment for your business alongside other cryptocurrencies?
Well, I’ve been in the crypto community for a while, I was even mining Dogecoin for fun! In April, I started buying CTSI and then decided to accept it as payment via NOWpayments. NOWpayments was one of the only systems we could integrate with our WordPress website. But we want to keep the list of currencies small, so far only accepting BTC (Bitcoin), ETH (Ethereum), and CNS (Centric Swap) alongside Cartesi’s CTSI.
I follow Cartesi every day. I don’t care about the CTSI price, I care about the project. My business partner Nathan and I want to educate our community about crypto and for us, accepting crypto as payment is a great way to introduce this. We want to support projects we firmly believe in and also help educate our existing and potential customers on the innovative technological benefits projects like Cartesi can bring.
That’s a really great initiative to help onboard more people to blockchain and crypto. Can you share how many people have paid using CTSI so far?
I think a handful. What might hold people back is that NOWpayments require a minimum of ~US$65 in payments, whereas an average lure costs $15–75. Those who paid in CTSI were more inner city and probably came through Twitter. A lot of people pay with ETH or BTC since those communities are bigger. It can also be hard to get Americans on board with new things. We’re stubborn, especially when it comes to tech! Some people still prefer to receive physical catalogs in the mail, but we’re working on helping people change this mindset.
A note from NOWPayments: “The minimum payment amount for CTSI is made up of two network fees. Such an amount keeps all the transactions from failing and is the same for transactions of any size. NOWPayments has CTSI operating on ERC20 where the fees are quite high and tend to fluctuate. We are planning on adding CTSI operations on different blockchains to help lower the minimum payment amount. To check minimum payments for different cryptocurrencies, you can refer to our Status Page.
We also are super grateful to Cartesi for the opportunity to address this matter! With the help of the community, we can improve our solutions and work constantly on providing our clients with the smoothest and most seamless experience possible.”
What’s the future for Louie’s Lures?
Currently, it’s just me and my business partner, Nathan Rathod, and we’re working 16 hours a day. Although we have some Team Louie community members in the EU and Canada, they can’t shop with us yet. But we hope within half a year they will be able to! It’s getting to the point where Nathan and I really need to start hiring some help, we’re looking for someone that has a passion for fishing and giving back to the community to build and grow our community alongside processing orders. If that sounds like you, get in touch with us!
Team Louie is growing, we’re looking at around 50,000 members with our current growth. Who knows what Cartesi can do for us in a few years, our developers could be working with your platform. That’s another thing that I like about Cartesi, I’ve worked with a lot of developers in my life and to be able to bring programming languages, other than Solidity to blockchain is huge! It can rapidly change the growth and adoption within the crypto space which is very much needed at this point.
Got hooked? Find more on Louie’s Lures over on their channels: Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn
Want to start accepting CTSI as payment for your business?
Learn more about how to get started with NOWpayments:
About Cartesi: Home to what’s next
Cartesi is the first OS on the blockchain, and their Layer-2 solution integrates Linux and standard programming environments to blockchain. This allows developers to code scalable smart contracts with rich software tools, libraries, and services they are used to.
Cartesi bridges the gap between mainstream software and blockchain, welcoming millions of new startups and their developers to blockchain by bringing Linux to blockchain applications. Cartesi combines a groundbreaking virtual machine, optimistic rollups, and side-chains to revolutionize the way developers create blockchain applications.
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