Hope all is well with you and yours. I'm writing this as a proposal to our community to aid in getting STEEM and SBD (Steem Backed Dollar) accepted on Coinpayments.net to make it easier for developers and site owners to accept STEEM/SBD. I believe in order for STEEM / SBD to survive long term we need to as a community develop goods and services to spend our hard earned STEEM & Steem Backed Dollars!
What is Coinpayments.net?
Coinpayments is a well known and established payment gateway provider based out of the west coast Canada. They boast an extremely positive track record for providing a fast, easy and secure 3rd party payment provider for those without enough technical knowledge to host their own wallets or develop their own crypto payment gateways. If an aspiring entrepreneur wanted to sell good or services for STEEM and/or Steem Backed Dollars (SBD) without having to go through the hassle of hosting their own wallet and coding everything, this is certainly a viable option.
How Can The STEEM Community Benefit From This?
The first and foremost way that getting both STEEM and SBD on Coinpayments.net would help our community is that currently there is no user friendly ("easy") way to accept these curriencies on your website. It takes a fair amount of technical knowledge, coding and a firm understanding in cryptocurrency currently if you'd like to accept STEEM / SBD on your site.
Secondly Coinpayments offers an incredibly easy to use API, a Wordpress/WooCommerce plugin to allow for rapid acceptance of STEEM/ SBD on hundreds of thousands of web stores using WP and as an added bonus the site also offers an easy to use point of sale terminal which merchants both in the real world and on the web will be able to use to trade STEEM/SBD for their goods and services.
How Much is This Going to Cost?
People HATE spending money out of their own pockets on stuff. This is where the beauty of STEEM / SBD comes into play with it's innovative voting reward system powered by the users of the network. It's up to all of us as Steemit users to help support the growth, adoption and evolution of STEEM in the ways that we can. Luckily on Steemit you can show monetary support for FREE simply by upvoting this proposal.
The Paid Way (Fast, Guaranteed, Easy, Possibly FREE)
It IS a possibility to buy our way onto the Coinpayments.net platform for $700 USD per added currency. The amount to have both STEEM and SBD added to the Coinpayments payment gateway totals $1400 USD. While I'm currently unable to pay for that entire $1400 USD listing fee myself I gladly pledge $100 USD worth of my own money (earned here) toward the cause as I believe it will truly help our STEEM community and network grow in value.
The Voting Way (Slow, Not Guaranteed, Charged Per Vote)
The passive and somewhat less efficient way we could go about trying to get Coinpayments.com is with their sites coin voting list that can be viewed at the following link: https://www.coinpayments.net/vote
Not only is this method NOT likely to get STEEM / SBD onto their payment gateway platform but it's highly likely that any Bitcoin used to boost the vote count will likely be wasted if we don't receive enough votes get to the top of the list and have our currencies added.
Even if you're not a web developer or online store manager this proposed addition of STEEM / SBD to the Coinpayments.net roster helps you as well, enabling the acceptance of our native STEEM network currency on millions of websites worldwide.
What If This Post Doesn't Fully Pay For Wallet Hosting?
No Problem! The funds will be held until we're at the amount needed to get the STEEM and SBD currencies added to Coinpayments. In the event where enough is raised by this post to only get 1 of the currencies implemented I'm leaning towards having SBD (Steem Backed Dollars) added first as we have a far greater number of liquid SBD than STEEM at any point of time.
Feel free to toss a vote on this article as a show of your support for the ongoing growth and development of our community! Alternatively if you instead wish to send SBD / STEEM / BTC to help me with the fees incurred for getting the 2 currencies hosted on Coinpayments please let me know in the comments below.
If by some chance that this post makes over the $1400 SBD payout goal needed to fully fund this initiative I'll be using the remaining awarded SBD to get STEEM / SBD payments integrated into my own under development projects as well as launch an Online Shop catering to STEEM network users featuring all sorts of goods and services for the community.
STEEM User Support Pledges:
Confirmed Pledges:
@venuspcs - $30 USD pledged
@klye - $100 USD pledged
@berniesanders - $220USD pledged
@sigmajin - $220USD pledged
Steem User Votes - ~$830 USD pledged
About $960 of the $1400 needed has been acquired to pay Coinpayments.net fees for SBD/STEEM listing have been raised through community upvoting! WOW.
This post has raised nearly 70% of the funds needed!
Big Thanks to @berniesanders & @sigmajin for generously offering to cover the remaining amount to have both SBD and STEEM integrated soon on Coinpayments.net
Through the AMAZING response from the STEEM community so far we've raised enough funding through upvotes to get SBD (Steem Backed Dollar) Added to Coinpayments.net! I've sent them an email and await a reply. Extremely exciting to have thee community band together to get something done that will benefit all of us.
Great Work STEEM Network Users!
Thank You to All Who Voted and Supported.
Update: A few very generous STEEM users (@berniesanders & @sigmajin) have contacted me with intent on helping pay for any outstanding amount the reward from this post doesn't cover to get both SBD and STEEM listed on Coinpayments! If this post fails to achieve its $1400 SBD payout goal through community upvote funding they've agreed to split the remaining costs between themselves. Looks like they end up splitting the remaining cost of $440 to help get this payment gateway on board. Thank you personally to the both of you. :)
Thank you on behalf of the entire STEEM network for stepping up to support the cause. Near the end of 1st payout period I'll contact these users with the outstanding amounts and list them here on the confirmed pledge list above.
Keep Voting! We As A Community Can Achieve Anything!
TL;DR
Please Upvote!
Call to The STEEM Dev Team, Witnesses & Whales:
@dan / @dantheman / @ned / @riverhead / @wang / @laonie or Any other whales I've neglected to mention please have a look at this proposal, consider helping the community by upvoting this to acquire much needed integration into well known payment gateways that will allow the STEEM ecosystem to flourish into the future.
Update:
Does anyone have a link to a complete STEEM API list so I can get the Coinpayments.net developers working on implementing our SBD and STEEM? Would be greatly appreciated! Please comment below if you have such a list.