2022! It’s a wrap…
Time to look back and share our perspective.
We’d like to say THANK YOU to our 500+ customers, 20+ technology partners & our community of 3,000+ NFT holders for an incredible year. We’ve enjoyed every minute building the Helio payments platform and interacting & learning from every valuable member of our community 🙏
By launching Helio 10 months ago, we decided to pursue a bold & disruptive idea:
Make it easy for anyone to accept payments, executed on a public blockchain instead of traditional, proprietary networks such as Visa, AMEX, Swift, etc., in order to unlock billions in economic value based on lower fees, faster settlement, better UX, increased privacy, micropayments & enabling entirely new business models.
This idea wasn't new per se but hadn’t been executed well and remained unproven. We’ve made incredible progress towards both these objectives🔥
The user experience of paying with Helio is already on par with traditional online payments in many scenarios, and superior for those users that are fluent in using a crypto wallet such as Phantom. Helio completely eliminates the need to sign-up, log-in or enter card details, and as a result users benefit from a faster checkout experience with higher conversions for merchants. See the Helio payment UX.
It’s fair to say the crypto industry faced many hurdles this year, from a tough bear market to the recent FTX fraud with its unfortunate ties to the Solana blockchain. We continued to build with conviction throughout, and delivered a unique platform & community that we should be really proud of.
2022 highlights:
- Since launching on Solana mainnet in July-22, Helio emerged as the leading payments provider on Solana with over 20k active wallets, 550 active merchant customers, including Solana, Triton, InBev, Toys r us, FamousFoxes, Holaplex, etc., and 100s of talented creators ⚡️
- Monthly payment volume grew at an average rate of ~40% MoM⚡️
- The average fee paid using Helio was ~0.5% since we introduced fees in November, delivering a saving of ~1.5% per transaction compared to traditional online payments⚡️
- We built at a relentless pace to deliver both “deep” features, such as NFT gating & token-swapped payments, as well as “broad” functionality to enable a wide range of use cases such as crypto subscription payments, invoicing and paywalls⚡️
- We launched “Helions”, the ultimate utility NFT which acts as a subscription to HelioX (our pro version), and helped us build a hugely valuable community of customers & ambassadors⚡️
- We laid the groundwork for a launch on the Polygon blockchain in January, with other blockchains such as Binance following thereafter⚡️
- We built the architecture behind Helio Play, the first web3-native video paywall for creators that will launch early 2023. Creator content is truly a giant opportunity and with web3 payments we can revolutionise the way that content is consumed & rewarded on the internet ⚡️
Our view of the opportunity in 2023:
We’re the only payments provider in the Solana ecosystem that succeeded in building a comprehensive solution with e-commerce payments/plug-ins, subscription payments, pay links, token-swapped payments, invoicing, NFT pre-sales, and deep developer tools (including webhooks, APIs, and UX components). Despite launching in a major downturn, we grew payments volume MoM from 0 to ~$2m in a few short months. We’re on track to continue this trajectory.
Crucially, we validated that the demand and use cases for Web3 payments are real and varied. For example, dozens of online stores use our Shopify integration for e-commerce payments with crypto, Solana itself used Helio to sell tickets in USDC to its flagship conference, Breakpoint 2022, +100 projects use Helio Pay Streams for subscription payments for SaaS, Discord subscriptions, while 100s of creators leverage Helio Pay Links for NFT pre-sales, e-commerce, invoicing, content paywalling and more.
These merchants chose us because: 1) they want to slash fees; 2) Helio offers deep integration options into their web2 systems; and most importantly, 3) they want to grow their sales by reaching a rapidly growing audience of digital natives who prefer to transact with a crypto wallet instead of card payments. This trend is expected to continue in 2023 and our vision to create a complete platform that facilitates the optimal payments experience, at very low cost, across any popular blockchain meets that demand 🔥
To sum it up, our achievements in 2022, including our proven product execution, velocity and continued traction across broader use cases, have put Helio in a very exciting position for 2023 to capitalise on the multi-billion dollar market opportunity that’s emerging in the payments industry as a result of web3 adoption.
If you’d like to learn more and hold a Helions NFT, you can unlock our latest presentation, including product & customer traction, 2023 growth plans and view of the market opportunity: https://www.hel.io/pay/63a5ce71abaae89abadee0a1
Happy New Year & LFG 2023 🚀
The Helio Team 🧡
