Hello, Solana.
Launching with Helius
Loop Crypto is live on Solana! We’re very excited to be launching with Helius, the leading Solana RPC provider that offers a full suite of developer tools powering some of the blockchain’s biggest names.
Loop has historically been focused on the EVM world, processing millions of payments on Ethereum and its layer 2 chains. This allowed us to work with some of the leading brands in web3, but we ultimately made the move to Solana because we believe the chain is a critical piece of global payments infrastructure.
As a development tooling provider that builds for their customers, Helius had already been out in front meeting their customers’ demands to support crypto payments, but they needed a payment system that could meet their current scale and rapid growth. This is where Loop’s feature set came in.
With Loop, Helius customers can now easily set up crypto autopay for their recurring payments (no more manually sending funds month after month). Loop’s integration with Stripe also unlocked Helius’s ability to support any payment model, including billing per API call, and streamlined their payment management processes end-to-end. Ultimately, Helius chose Loop to increase its revenues, reduce churn, and improve its financial reporting capabilities.
We are excited about the future of Solana as a payment rail for many reasons. As of October 2024, Solana already has over $3.5B in stablecoins circulating. Transaction confirmation times are measured not in seconds, but in milliseconds. The fundamentals for fast, global, interoperable payments are here.
To help others curious about the move from EVM to Solana, we will be posting a series of articles in the coming weeks about our experience. Stay tuned for that! In the meantime, we’d like to introduce ourselves, explain how crypto subscriptions work, and outline the path we took to deploying on Solana.
Hi, we’re Loop
Loop Crypto is an onchain payment processor. We make it simple for merchants to offer crypto as a payment option for their customers, regardless of whether the payment is one-time or recurring, while allowing merchants to settle in fiat or crypto. Merchants can implement Loop in several different ways: by embedding our checkout links or widget directly within their sites, utilizing one of our out-of-the-box integrations with Stripe or Chargebee, or white-labeling Loop via our APIs.
Accepting crypto is table stakes for global merchants offering developer tools. These merchants serve a customer segment that wants and often needs to pay in crypto. Studies show that adding more payment methods can increase revenue. For example, 85% of customers abandon a purchase if their preferred payment method is not available. We’re straight to the point people, so here are some relevant stats about Loop:
~80% of payments we process are from outside the US
~20% of payments are in crypto across all our merchants accepting crypto and fiat via self-serve checkouts
Getting set up with Loop takes 15 minutes for simple subscriptions or one-time payments. For more complex integrations that include many pricing models and products, we offer white-glove onboarding and a dedicated developer team.
How crypto subscriptions work
Onchain subscriptions work just like subscriptions with credit cards. Users provide authorization to the merchant to automatically charge them each month. For credit cards, this means handing over your credit card number and billing information. For onchain payments, this means providing a token authorization to the merchant.
The Loop checkout page makes it easy to provide this authorization. Here’s how it works:
Payers select a payment token from a merchant’s pre-configured list
Payers sign a transaction to approve the merchant’s contract as a delegate, authorizing the merchant to charge the customer each period
Payers provide their email addresses so that they can receive receipts and be notified of any upcoming payments or payment issues
The payer maintains full control over the token account and can edit this approval at any time. Loop makes such editing easily available on our Customer Portal.
Crossing the bridge
In the coming weeks, we will be sharing a series of blog posts documenting the process we went through to go live on Solana and sharing some of the considerations to keep in mind if you’re making a similar move. As a sneak peek, below are a few of the areas where we had to spend time rewiring our EVM brains and adapting Loop’s architecture to support payments on Solana.
Smart contract development
One of the most critical areas of adaptation for us was bringing our Solidity-based smart contract logic to Solana. To do this, we utilized Solang, a compiler that enabled us to port over existing Solidity smart contracts and package them in Rust.
We’ll be diving deeper into this topic in a subsequent article, but suffice it to say that this tooling allowed our developers to quickly deploy on Solana without spending months learning the ins and outs of Rust.
Wallet interactions
Another key element was learning the basics of how Solana wallets and token accounts work. There are some slight nuances and differences compared to EVM. For one, in EVM development, wallet addresses are not case-sensitive, but in Solana development, they are. This meant we had to update our backend tables to handle the new formatting structure.
Configuring our RPC
When using an RPC, speed and reliability are paramount. We chose to work with Helius for our Solana RPC needs not only because of their leading technical capabilities, but also because the team provided invaluable advice on how to optimize our onchain performance.
Their docs had helpful advice, and the team directly provided support on our specific setup. Given the unprecedented levels of chain activity recently on Solana, we ended up engaging closely with the Helius team to optimize our process for sending transactions to the chain and ensuring they are immediately picked up and confirmed. There were a number of technical nuances to this that the Helius team was instrumental in guiding us through.
Looking forward
We’re excited to be on Solana to support the community. If you have payment needs on Solana, let’s talk. We would love to learn more about your product and see how we can help you with Loop’s suite of payment offerings from checkout pages to integrations and APIs.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
About Loop
At Loop Crypto, we build infrastructure to unlock truly programmable money and create an open financial system. We enable crypto payments for 50+ of the top web3 companies, including Helius, Pinata, Neynar, Paragraph, Kaito, ETHGlobal, and ENS, supporting millions of dollars transacted and saving thousands of hours.
Whether the payment is one-time or recurring, Loop supports a broad range of payment use cases: subscriptions, one-time charges, recurring bill pay, loan repayments, and donations. Our integrations with Stripe, QuickBooks, and Xero make it easy to implement crypto payments within your existing operations.
If you’re ready to get started, book a call with our team to get started in minutes.
Stay in the Loop.