Chicago, IL. June 18 2024. Sphere, the innovative payment solutions provider specializing in stablecoin transactions, proudly announces its continued partnership with Chainalysis, the blockchain data platform. This collaboration, beginning in 2023, aims to bolster Sphere’s compliance and anti-money laundering (AML) strategies, ensuring the highest levels of trust for its users.

Leveraging Chainalysis’ Crypto Compliance Solution, in particular Address Screening, Sphere has implemented real-time wallet monitoring to detect and flag suspicious activities automatically. This collaboration enables Sphere to focus on its core mission: providing seamless, secure, and cost-effective payment solutions to merchants, particularly in underserved regions.

“As a company dedicated to financial inclusion and stability, collaborating with Chainalysis has been a significant step in our commitment to regulatory excellence and user safety,” said Arnold Lee, Co-Founder of Sphere. “With the help of Chainalysis’ Compliance Solution, we extend our platform compliance with global compliance standards and mission to foster greater trust and adoption of stablecoins in emerging markets.”

Chainalysis’ data-driven solutions are crucial in combating illicit activities within the cryptocurrency space. Their 2024 Crypto Crime Report highlights that despite illicit crypto transaction volumes constituting a small fraction of overall activity, the absolute value remains substantial. By integrating Chainalysis’ compliance solution, Sphere has enhanced its ability to trace and mitigate illicit fund flows, providing an additional layer of protection for its users.

“We are excited to collaborate with Sphere, a company making significant strides in promoting financial inclusion through stablecoin adoption,” said Nicola Buonanno, VP Southern EMEA and LatAm at Chainalysis.

“Our mission to create a safe environment for digital asset interaction aligns perfectly with Sphere’s vision. This collaboration will undoubtedly play a pivotal role in fostering a more secure and transparent financial ecosystem.”

Benefits of the Collaboration for Sphere Users:

● Peace of mind through automatic wallet monitoring

● Reduced risk of engaging with blacklisted or illicit wallets

● Strengthened trust and reliability in Sphere’s payment solutions

This collaboration marks a significant milestone in Sphere’s journey towards establishing itself as a leader in secure, reliable, and inclusive payment solutions within the stablecoin ecosystem.

About Sphere:

Sphere is an innovative platform designed to facilitate stablecoin transactions, offering merchants in underserved regions access to secure, cost-effective, and near-instant cross-border payments. With a focus on financial inclusion, Sphere provides a seamless interface that integrates stablecoins with financial service providers, driving economic growth and stability in emerging markets.

Interested in learning more about how Sphere can transform your payment processes? Learn more on our website or request access today.

Telegram: Angel Herrera
@AngeldeSolana

Sphere Laboratories (“Sphere”), the “operating system for stablecoins”, today announced the close of its $2.8m seed round. The round was co-led by The Chernin Group (TCG Crypto) and Jump Crypto, with participation from Hudson River Trading, Republic Capital, Big Brain Holdings, Solana Ventures, SteelDAO, Stakeholder Ventures, and various angel investors including Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal.

The Landscape

Stablecoins increased in market capitalization by 700,000% from $20 million in 2017 to $140 billion in 2024. At the same time, stablecoin transfer volume reached over $7 trillion per year in 2022 and $1.2 trillion in Dec. 2023 alone, outpacing all major card networks except Visa.

Stablecoin adoption comes as no surprise. The introduction of SWIFT in 1973 and the current correspondent banking model has struggled to keep pace with technology developments. In a digital world with accelerating data propagation, over 40% of banks still run on legacy software written in COBOL. This and factors like the rise of internet native settlement has contributed to a 20% decline in intermediary correspondent banks, which let foreign banks accept dollars. With US dollars in 90% of global FX and used to denominate the majority of the world’s debt, the need for more accessible dollars has skyrocketed.

The need for alternatives is especially accentuated in emerging markets. Latin America and Oceania had the biggest decline in correspondent relationships, a foreseeable result given the credit and risk constraints of developing regions. This is despite massive growth, with emerging market remittance outflows reaching $669 billion and a $39.3 trillion business cross-border payments market in 2023. Hence, their over-representation for stablecoin adoption despite challenging roadblocks such as poor user experience hindering potential growth.

The Product:

Sphere is paving the way for merchants from under-addressed emerging markets to access cost-effective, secure, and near instant cross-border payments via stablecoins. In the same way that an operating system is the fundamental interface between a computer and a user, Sphere is building the software that connects end-users with stablecoins. Through beautiful and accessible graphic user interfaces (GUIs), Sphere orchestrates blockchains, custodial infrastructure, and financial service providers to make stablecoin payments accessible. On-the-ground efforts in Latin America & the Caribbean have led to early traction, including a first $1m volume day and greater than 1,000% month-over-month growth since the start of 2024.

The Founding

Sphere began with a global hackathon win in a payments category sponsored by Stripe. Co-founders Arnold Lee and Luigi Charles met as Columbia undergrads in 2015. Bonding over shared experiences of financial upheaval, they became best friends and built software together. Arnold grew up with parents born during the Korean War, who would eventually emigrate during South Korea’s Third Republic dictatorship and after the Vietnam War. Luigi’s family fled Guyanese hyperinflation and authoritarianism in the 1980s, before settling in The Bahamas. Seeing the effects of financial exclusion locally, Luigi started his career at traditional asset managers such as Vanguard and Franklin Templeton. Given a family background in construction, Arnold got his first taste of distributed systems engineering at IoT startups.

Although they had exposure to crypto as early as 2009, “It wasn’t until we saw digital dollars on-chain where it hit. Wow. This just makes a lot of sense. We can explain this to friends and family back home, and it’s obvious how this would have made a big difference. My dad used to remit money back to Korea by paper mail. No credit history, no bank account. Stablecoins would have saved him decades in starting over,” said Arnold Lee, CEO.

“Open access to the world’s reserve currency can be assumed in the developed world,” added Luigi Charles, CTO. “If you happen to be born in a place with local inflation and outdated or little financial infrastructure, you’re sort of stuck. Correspondent dollar accounts and FDI become hard to obtain because now you’re considered ‘high risk.’ The result is that each year, your purchasing power decreases faster than wage growth. No matter how much you try to stay afloat, you slowly sink. The only way out is to emigrate, further entrenching this limbo.”

Since inception, Sphere has partnered with leading web3 companies such as Helium, Latitude.sh, Squads, DRiP, and Helius. This brought the attention of non-crypto native merchants who sought to use stablecoins to modernize their cross-border payments. With surging demand in Latin America, Sphere is on-the-ground to serve customers in countries like Mexico, Chile, and Brazil. Sphere’s seed funding will enable the company to further invest in engineering and compliance resources to reduce costs and increase access for end-merchants.

If their mission of accelerating accessible value transfer around the world resonates with you, the team is hiring across sales and engineering. Otherwise, if you are a merchant facing high cross-border payment fees or just don’t know how to get started with stablecoins, visit https://spherepay.co/ to learn more.

Contact information:

Angel Herrera

+1 781 402 9988
team@spherepay.co

Sphere Pay is a B2B payments platform and API for digital payments. Businesses can start accepting card, ACH, wire, stablecoins, and other digital currencies in a single checkout page, through a single integration, for up to 10x lower fees.

At Sphere, our mission is to unlock global access to digital payments. Today, the Pyth Oracle Network provides our users with the most accurate price conversions at lightning fast speeds. This ensures that users of the platform are able to best anticipate their spending in real time.

Real-time Price feeds from Pyth supports institutional-grade market data for on and off-chain data — from fiat currency foreign exchange rates to swap rates on liquidity pools across blockchain networks. Available data can be found here.

Through this integration, merchants and their customers have additional confirmation that they’re getting the best possible rates when transacting.

Having begun our journey with Pyth in 2023, we continue to be surprised by the consistent updates and added coverage of new assets to their feeds.

Today, we’re honored to announce that we have been chosen as a recipient of the Retrospective Airdrop program. Here’s how we’ll use the funds:

1. On-chain subscriptions will receive a major upgrade.

We pioneered escrow-less subscriptions for the Solana ecosystem. Without the need for token wrapping or unwrapping, our peer-to-peer subscription contract has seen significant adoption — from the most popular multi-signature wallet, Squads, to prominent tax platforms like Netrunner and best-in-class infrastructure like Helius. Continuing to expand on the real-time data feeds, we allow merchants to accept any digital currency and have those purchases settled in their preferred asset. The necessity for high fidelity and precise pricing data will be crucial for this implementation.

2. Invoices are coming to Sphere

One of the most requested features is finally coming to the platform. Users will be able to bill customers for services seamlessly. Recurring invoices will be a key addition to the subscription product and inherit new features.

3. Incorporating off-chain data feeds for global merchants

As a global company, the necessity to provide up-to-date conversion pairs for currencies will serve a vital purpose for our merchant network. Using Pyth’s ever-expanding coverage of assets, we will give business owners the tools to manage their finances from a single dashboard.

If you are a founder/builder curious to learn more about the core infrastructure that powers Sphere, here’s where to get started:

• Official Website: https://pyth.network
• Price Feeds: https://pyth.network/price-feeds
• Docs: https://docs.pyth.network
• Twitter: https://x.com/PythNetwork
• Discord: https://discord.com/invite/PythNetwork

Bonus: We’re excited to announce that $PYTH is now available as a payment method on Sphere.

After almost a year in stealth, we are excited to unveil a brand new website with more information about what we’re building.

The best part? This initial release is less than half of it.

We will be releasing an upgrade to the website and platform into the New Year. Until then, we just couldn’t wait to show you now.

Give it a spin yourself at https://spherepay.co/

If what we’re building seems like it could help you and/or your business, please get in touch! We’d love to support and build together if we can.

Please send inquires to team@spherepay.co.

We’re thrilled to be unveiling a long-time update to the Helium Data Credits Portal: introducing support for the Helium Mobile network!

See the announcement on X: https://twitter.com/sphere_labs/status/1731710774543000051

Earlier this year, Sphere helped build the payments infrastructure for Helium IoT’s Data Credits Portal. This platform allows hotspot operators and network users to easily pay for data credits to use the Helium network, a decentralized wireless infrastructure composed of 100,000s of nodes.

After months of work, we are excited to announce that the DC Portal has been upgraded to support Helium Mobile. Helium Mobile is a people powered wireless network for mobile. Earlier this year, they partnered with T-Mobile for a 5-year deal to provide 5G to users for just $5 per month.

Leveraging the BME infrastructure that Sphere already built for IoT and its programs, we were able to give Helium Mobile users a similar experience to the operators and end-users leveraging their IoT network.

Now, Mobile users can similarly choose to delegate their balances to operators to use the network, or get access manually by directly interacting with Helium’s programs — all in one place.

Feel free to give it a spin yourself at: https://dc-portal.helium.com/

It was an absolute pleasure working with the world-class teams at Helium Foundation and Helium Mobile to release this product upgrade.

Are you building a physical infrastructure network and want something similar out-of-the-box? Let us handle all of the payments, compliance, risk and contract interaction for you. Please get in touch at team@spherepay.co.

Today, we’re excited to announce a brand new partnership with a next generation platform for creators and collectors: DRiP!

Founded by serial entrepreneur Vibhu Norby who previously founded or worked as an early employee at companies such as b8ta, Nest, and Roblox, DRiP is a modern approach to empowering creators and collectors.

Through DRiP, users can receive free collectibles from the creators that they subscribe to — whether art, music, games, or otherwise each week.

Thanks to this novel content distribution channel, collectors can congregate in a single place to reach and support their favorite content creators, as well as discover new ones. On the other hand, creators are able to utilize DRiP’s robust platform to reach a wider audience and develop closer relationships with their fans.

This win-win relationship that the DRiP platform enables has led to quick growth. In less than a year, the DRiP platform has received millions of unique site visits, more than 100,000 followers across social media platforms, and legions of world class creators who are eager to get their content in front of the next generation and reach new audiences.

Part of today’s announcement was Droplets 2.0. This in-app currency is a way for collectors to show appreciation for their most favorite creators. Although users are issued some number of free droplets per day, the rapid expansion of collectibles on the platform means that many collectors are unable to subscribe to all of the creators that they would otherwise like to.

Enter Droplets 2.0 and Sphere. Through our universal checkout, DRiP collectors are able to top-off their droplets balance at-will for an affordable price — meaning that collectors never have to worry about missing the next DRiP drop for their favorite creators and ones that they have yet to discover. Through droplets, collectors can not only give to their favorite creators, but can also compete for leaderboard spots for the chance to win special versions of collectibles that creators prepare for their biggest fans.

This new product gives creators a brand new way to get paid out — instantly. Traditional content distribution platforms like Instagram and YouTube take a huge cut of what their content creators would otherwise make. Thanks to DRiP, creators have a competitive platform where they can reach a large audience but also retain a close relationship with their biggest fans.

We’re thrilled to be able to support DRiP in their mission to empower both creators and collectors, and in less than 12 hours after the launch, are happy to report that transactions have been flying off the shelf as eager fans have been topping off their droplet balances.

If you are interested in learning more about DRiP or this integration, please check out the official announcement on X: https://twitter.com/drip_haus/status/1730740441111556462. For those that are interested in getting access to a similar, seamless, and universal payment experiences for fraction of traditional processing rates, please reach out to Sphere at team@spherepay.co or our X: @sphere_labs.

⚪️ x ⬛️ pic.twitter.com/dUHKh7g4OS

We’re excited to announce that Sphere will be powering the payments for io.net, a next generation compute-as-a-service for large-scale AI startups.

io.net is a distributed physical infrastructure network, which creates a marketplace for end-users to rent out their idle compute power to machine learning engineers to access cloud clusters at a small fraction of the cost of comparable centralized services. Because modern machine learning models have intense distributed computing requirements, the recent rise in popularity of AI, obtaining sufficient compute power can be difficult.

Getting access to hardware via traditional cloud services like AWS, GCP or Azure can often take up to weeks, a non-starter in a rapidly evolving vertical. Moreover, popular GPU models are often unavailable, and users have limited choice in location, security levels, latency, and other key options. The net result is that startups can easily spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, monthly, on training and inference.

Enter io.net. By aggregating GPUs from underutilized sources (e.g., independent data centers, cryptocurrency miners, and decentralized physical infrastructure networks like Filecoin and Render), engineers can tap into an overlooked source of compute in a system that is accessible, customizable, and an order of magnitude more cost-efficient.

With io.net, teams can scale their workloads across a network of GPUs with minimal adjustments. The system handles orchestration, scheduling, fault tolerance, and scaling and supports a variety of tasks such as preprocessing, distributed training, hyperparameter tuning, reinforcement learning, and model serving. It is designed to serve general-purpose computation for Python workloads, and is purpose-built for batch inference and model serving, parallel training, parallel hyperparameter tuning, and reinforcement learning. See their docs to learn more.

For a globally distributed compute network, utilizing stablecoins as a way to purchase compute credits was a natural choice for reducing cross-border payments friction and increasing coverage and availability. Sphere will act as a payments gateway for end-users to purchase credits via stablecoins or card, and our on-chain infrastructure will also seamlessly enable io.net to payout their cluster hosts programmatically.

By processing payments on high throughput decentralized ledgers like Solana, end-users and cluster hosts will be able to reduce settlement latency from weeks to seconds, and save anywhere from 3–6%, and in some cases even more, on each of their payment fees. Compared to traditional payment processors and even cryptocurrency focused gateways, using Sphere’s on and off-chain infrastructure can represent up to a 300–700% relative cost reduction at current transaction fees. With proprietary algorithms for price dynamic optimistic block confirmation across networks and transaction scheduling during periods of low congestion on legacy virtual machines, these cost savings are further accentuated.

It was a pleasure to work in collaboration with the io.net team on a more complex integration that took just a few weeks. We’re thrilled to be supporting them in creating the world’s largest decentralized physical infrastructure network for compute, with more exciting developments to follow shortly. If you’re similarly interested in accepting and paying out in stablecoins and/or fiat, please get in touch.

🍎🔊 Sound on pic.twitter.com/5X2oJJYGb1

We’re thrilled to announce that select merchants will now be able to accept payments from their customers with Apple Pay, receiving stablecoins.

The integration is available in our pre-built checkouts, and is also invokable via React SDK for merchants who wish to build their own user experience.

Of course, the integration will be mobile-optimized from Day 1. If you’re interested in this feature, please get in touch.

Since inception in 2014, Apple Pay has become one of the fastest growing payment methods in the world, with over 500 million global active users, 60% YoY transaction volume growth in 2022 alone, and a 92% domination of the US mobile debit wallet market since 2020. It felt that it was the right time to pair it with digital currency payments, which has similarly seen exponential multi-trillion growth to rival major card networks like Visa.

We will be releasing a longer case study on the product at a future date.

Estamos encantados de anunciar que comerciantes selectos ahora podrán aceptar pagos de sus clientes con Apple Pay y recibir los fondos en monedas estables (stablecoins).

La integración está disponible en nuestros procesos de pago prediseñados y también se puede invocar a través de React SDK para los comerciantes que deseen crear su propia experiencia de usuario.

Por supuesto, la integración estará optimizada para dispositivos móviles desde el principio. Si está interesado en esta función, por favor póngase en contacto.

Desde su creación en 2014, Apple Pay se ha convertido en uno de los métodos de pago de más rápido crecimiento en el mundo, con más de 500 millones de usuarios activos en todo el mundo, crecimiento interanual del 60% en el volumen de transacciones solo en 2022 y un dominio del 92% del mercado de billeteras de débito móviles de EE. UU. desde 2020. Sentimos que era el momento adecuado para combinarlo con los pagos en moneda digital, que de manera similar ha experimentado un crecimiento exponencial de varios billones de dólares que ahora compite con las principales redes de tarjetas como Visa.

Publicaremos un estudio de caso más extenso sobre el producto en una fecha futura.

Introducing: "True" Blockchain Subscriptions

Pull payments, where customers authorize businesses to withdraw money from their account instead of sending the money themselves, have been one of the most difficult payment problems to solve on blockchains.

Think about the most common subscriptions in your lives. Whether it’s Netflix or Amazon Prime, once you approve a subscription, these companies can withdraw from your card or bank account without your explicit approval each time. Subscribe and forget.

There are several reasons why this is challenging on blockchain. High gas fees, latency, and signing issues have historically made recurring payments infeasible. Imagine your $7 Netflix subscription became 10–20% more expensive due to gas each month and you had to approve again every time — assuming low congestion. An obvious non-starter for most.

What about account abstraction?

Even with new advancements like account abstraction, which lets smart contracts sign for users and allows gas sponsors, there’s still a lot of setup involved. Further, it’s still unclear who should cover the gas. Some creative solutions include setting up centralized networks to cover gas fees or using an escrow-like system, occasionally with variations of token standards.

Hasn’t this been done before?

Escrow-style “subscriptions” have been one of the biggest misnomers within the industry. Although it is true that funding an escrow account and cranking that escrow periodically to disburse funds is a form of recurring payment, the UX is completely different from normal subscriptions.

Users must effectively pre-pay for their subscription to fund the escrow, continuously keep track of their escrow balances, and sign additional transactions to cancel or renew. This complicated process requires precise account management from users, and more importantly is capital inefficient — imagine having to pay for all 12 months of Amazon Prime up-front just to get started with a yearly “subscription”.

Whether advertised as “real-time streamed payments” or otherwise, customers must fundamentally pre-lock up assets that merchants then claim through signing transactions each billing period.

Although some have explored alternatives like token allowances, there’s a lot that can go wrong. Malicious merchants could drain the wallets of unwitting customers without proper controls — akin to a DeFi exploit.

Sphere, Solana, and the solution

Fortunately, newer high throughput blockchains like Solana have cheap enough fees, low enough latency, and built-in account abstraction to make “true” on-chain subscriptions possible. The real challenge isn’t just the subscription, but ensuring smooth billing, proper merchant behavior, and a developer experience that is a single API call: no proxies necessary.

At Sphere, we’ve spent the last year creating a protocol that enables merchants to offer their customers subscribe and forget — no escrow, token wrapping/unwrapping, relayer networks, or confusing token standard forks necessary. It is available via API, and can be directly invoked by any other smart contract through CPI.

The way that it works is simple. Customers approve future purchases up to some limit that the merchant sets, and then payments are non-custodially transferred directly to the merchant each billing cycle by our contract. For maximum flexibility, merchants still have the option to choose escrowed-style subscriptions if they wish. But the key is that they now have the choice of a better user experience — Sphere also provides a separate web portal where customers can freely view and manage their existing subscriptions, just like you might find in a traditional platform like Stripe.

We recently released this product with Squads, the primary multi-sig on Solana, and with Sollinked, an up-and-coming web3 social media app. If you’re interested in on-chain subscriptions, please get in touch.

Why does this matter?

Given all this context, why do “true” on-chain pull payments matter at all? Aren’t escrow-based subscriptions good enough? Well, subscriptions have become the dominant monetization platform from ecommerce to gaming. Offering subscriptions increases purchases due to convenience, cost, and recurring revenue streams for platforms to build better products. Convenience is listed as a top reason for consumer adoption, and churn due to poor user experience (e.g., more clicks and accounting) is well understood as a problem — especially in web3.

Visa’s exploration of account abstraction identified recurring payments as one of the exciting new unlocks. As user experience improves across vectors from custody to app interaction, we’re excited to announce this contribution to the payments experience on-chain — getting one step closer to a web2-like experience with all the benefits of decentralization.

Sphere Pay is a payments platform and API for digital currencies. Businesses can start accepting card, ACH, wire, stablecoins, and other digital currencies in a single checkout page, through a single integration, for 3–10x less in fees.

Today, we’re excited to announce a new partnership with Pyth, a leading market data publisher that delivers real-time price feeds. This data is robustly sourced from major financial institutions — including some of the world’s biggest exchanges, market makers, and trading firms such as CBOE, Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Two Sigma, and Tower Research.

At Sphere, our digital payments APIs often need to interact with real-time on and off-chain data — from fiat currency foreign exchange rates to swap rates on liquidity pools across networks. For our merchants, and their customers, to get the most fresh and accurate rates on currency exchange, we needed a solution that would consume and aggregate this data at scale.

Pyth, another project incubated by Jump Trading that has spun-out into its own full-fledged company, was a natural choice. Thanks to their unparalleled access to institutional-grade market data, Sphere and its customers can be guaranteed high-fidelity exchange rates across crypto, equities, FX, and commodities — in real time, at checkout.

This is made possible through Pyth’s two core products: price feeds and archival market data. Publishers, from exchanges to market makers, submit this data to Pyth, which uses a decentralized ledger to consume, aggregate, and make this data freshly and directly available for our smart contracts to perform non-custodial on-chain payments processing.

On the other hand, benchmarks give archival data akin to a Bloomberg Terminal. This way, Sphere can run its own analysis to intelligently schedule and settle balances on lower-throughput networks during periods of high congestion for the best possible prices.

Sphere provides a Stripe-like experience for businesses that want exposure to digital currencies, of which stablecoins alone did a staggering $7 trillion amount of volume last year. Through this partnership, merchants and their customers have additional confirmation that they are getting the best possible rates when transacting across borders or networks. If you are interested in learning more or seeing a demo, please get in touch.