We already offer the widest range of payment options to enable our Carrier Services customers to (pre)pay us as quickly and easily as possible, worldwide. These payments are processed automatically, immediately on receipt, 24x7x365. We don’t need to send you embarrassing emails advising nobody is about to check the bank because we’ve gone horse-riding – you can and do pay us anytime and it gets dealt with. There’s card payments too for real-time payments on those occasions where your bank cannot send immediately.
However, the world is changing, and banks are not the most efficient way of moving value now. Personally, I relish the prospect of doing the majority of our business payments peer-to-peer, without all the frustrations that go with having an entitled bank in the middle. As a baby-step towards that, effective today, Carrier Services customers can make payments to us in USDT or USDC over the Solana network, as a number of our customers have asked for.
We’ve chosen Solana for its speed and cost-effectiveness, and not least because it processes 250-300m transactions per day – more than all other chains put together. Meanwhile USDT (Tether) and USDC are the two leading stablecoins, both based on the US Dollar. We are not at this time supporting other blockchains and have not built support for other stablecoins such as those tracking GBP or the Euro because they’re just not used much. We’ll be adding support for Bitcoin (and Lightning) over the coming several months, once the newly-enabled transmission of stablecoins over those rails is more evolved.
Within the payments section of the portal you’ll find a unique wallet address. This is yours, unique for your account, and should not change unless, for some reason, we need to regenerate our keys. You can therefore use this anytime to send any amount of USDC or USDT over Solana to your account. As with Fiat top-ups, round amounts will be treated as top-ups and processed in real-time; odd amounts which don’t look like top-ups (e.g. $563.27) will be held in suspense for our accounts team to interpret. It is very important that you only send USDC or USDT, other tokens will not be processed and are likely to get lost, and that you use only the Solana network – anything sent to your Solana address on another blockchain will be lost.
Although we’ve focussed on the most popular two stablecoins which are denominated in USD, you can use these to top up Simwood accounts in other currencies. On receipt, we will convert to EUR or GBP (and any future supporting billing currency) at our house Treasury rate. Before this, and for accounting purposes, we are assuming 1 USDT/USDC is exactly equal to 1 USD, even though their market rates may fluctuate – we will absorb that difference.
On the off-chance any customer or supplier receiving payments from us is reading this, we remain very keen to make payments over non-bank rails – please let us know if you support this and would like us to pay that way.
We hope you find this useful and look forward to receiving your deposits!
For the more technical amongst you, we’ve built this in-house, no third-party APIs and we’ve done it right. With the largest of crypto exchanges suffering theft due to poor design or social engineering, we wanted to do it differently. We’ve completely removed humans from the process and when you deposit to your unique hot-wallet, funds are immediately swept to cold-storage, automatically using keys held securely in our password management system. No keys reside on nodes or in code as others have been caught out with – they’re accessed temporarily only for the seconds it takes to sweep funds away. In fact this “Secrets Automation” is standard across the Simwood stack.
Finally, Pete would like to add – all of our other processes in terms of KYC, nuisance calls etc. Anyone thinking this is some form of manner by which to evade the world-leading protections we have in place, would be sorely mistaken. In fact, if you wanted to enjoy those protections on a BYoC basis, you now have additional options to pay for it.
