Decaf

Customer comments
Used at Solana Spaces

At Decaf, we believe that blockchain will change the way payments are done.

Inspiration

Living in Latin America was our inspiration. It was the continent that holds the most crypto, but there was still no way to use it on every day items.

In Latam often people prefer to hold/save value in US dollars because of things like inflation and devaluation of their local currency.

Our goal was to make crypto useful. Actually, our name Decaf was inspired by the idea of being able to buy a cup of coffee with your crypto (decentralized café). Not just coffee, but any IRL item. We knew it needed to be the easiest user experience possible - as easy as tapping a card to pay, and that’s what we did.

We are the easiest way to unlock the value of crypto in retail. We see a world where every corner store, cafe, or local business is a place where you can spend your crypto and on/off ramp.

What it does

We allow businesses to accept crypto, and also sell it, by providing them a Point of Sales system that accepts USDC and can be fully integrated into Square.

Leveraging Square’s features such as:

✅ Tax management
✅ Inventory management
✅ Card payments

and combining it with our:

✅ Crypto payments
✅ NFT gated commerce
✅ Wallet management

to create the Next generation of Point Of Sales.

How we built it

We had been given the challenge by Solana Spaces to make the easiest crypto payment experience possible, with NFT discounts and loyalty programs. But they still needed other features such as inventory and tax management, and card payments. So we decided to start looking into different options and found out that Square was the best one since it has really good documentation for their APIs and a great testing environment.

We decided to integrate Decaf PoS with Square’s Terminal, since it allows us to create itemized checkouts and orders from Decaf and send them to Square using the Terminal API. Having the ability to sync everything with square (even the crypto payments) allows us to leverage their inventory and tax management, and also be able to offer card payments in our Point Of Sales.

Our Decaf Point of Sales for USDC is built using Solana Pay's Transaction request standard for paying with USDC. We decided to build a web based solution so that our users don't have any hardware limitations to make it more accessible.

Challenges we ran into

Integrating a completely new way of paying (USDC with crypto wallets) with Square. We needed to make our Point of Sales features with Squares by linking USDC payments to the Square Terminal, matching and updating the square inventory management in real time.
We built security/permissioning levels, like admin/manager/cashier, 2FA for logins and wallet management, whilst making it simple to use.
Sending user's NFTs to their crypto wallets as loyalty rewards, and creating discounts based on what NFT they held.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Everyone loves how easy our solution is to use. One Fintech expert using our PoS at Solana Spaces said it was the best web 2.5/3 experience he has ever seen.
We had $1000 of sales in USDC in an afterparty at the Formula One which was our first test.
We are the official Point of Sales for Solana Spaces, which is the first time web3 has been in retail. We've had around 20,000 of USDC transactions within the first 2 weeks of opening in NYC. Solana Spaces is launching another flagship store in Miami this week.
We have onboarded EmpireDAO, and have many more reaching out to use our solution.
It is a genuinely pioneering innovation, and has not been done before.

What we learned

Easy user experience is incredibly important. Easy UX will be how this get the first 1 billion users into crypto/web3 payments.
Distribution partners (like Square) are crucial and could help us take this to the first 1 billion people, and truly revolutionize payments.

What's next for Decaf

This week we will be launching the Solana Spaces store in Miami. The biggest crypto venue in the world.
We will be launching a cash to crypto onramp.
Opening up our support docs and guides to allow businesses to use Decaf with Square.
KYC levels that are gated by NFTs.