Hi HN! I’ve been frustrated with traditional payments for a while. Paypal has frozen my funds on two occasions; and in one of them the funds were never recoverable. When I’m not using PayPal, international bank transfers take days and charge me insane amounts.

Also, every country usually has their own payment app parallel to the banking system: Portugal, where i currently live, has MB WAY, Brazil has PIX, Argentina has Mercadopago, the US has Cashapp. None of these work with each other.

Money still feels like pre-dotcom era tech when it should feel like a whatsapp message: send instant, anywhere, and for free.

Me and my team have been building Peanut to make money feel like Whatsapp. Peanut is a payments app, like Cashapp, but it works in any country. On top of that, you do more than only instant Peanut to Peanut payments; Peanut works with Banks, Peanut works with apps like MercadoPago and Pix, and if they have none of that, Peanut also works with crypto.

We wanted to build Peanut the right way, and that’s why:

- We’re not published on any app store. Peanut is a Progressive Web App (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_app) (of which I sadly see way too few !!). This way we don’t have to bow to the Apple/Google tech cabal and can rely on open standards. - The core of peanut is decentralized & non-custodial. The only one that has control of the funds is the user; as it should be. Peanut is not like a traditional bank, where fraud, political instability, or a bank-run might pwn you. Your funds are always yours and no one else can touch them. - Your funds are secured by passkey. This is much harder to crack or extract than a password or pin, and you won’t get pwned if your seed phrase gets leaked. We think it’s a much better approach for consumers. - Trust is crucial; all the app code is open-source at https://github.com/peanutprotocol/peanut-ui/tree/peanut-wall... - The app is completely free; we only passthrough banking costs. The way we intend to make money is off of merchants in the future. We believe Visa and Mastercard take a way too big of a chunk of payments, and we can be competitive with them.

My personal favorite feature that we’ve built: generate a send link, drop it in a chat with the person you’re talking with, and let them receive it in whatever option they want (no questions asked!).

We’re still in Beta, so I hope you can forgive any tech hiccups. We’re also rolling out country support on a week-by-week basis; by the end of October we should have full EU, US & LATAM banking coverage. But I wanted to launch Show HN early, because I respect this community a lot and have always loved getting feedback from it (and often giving my own!).

Also, let me know your username and I’m happy to send you a few $ to play around with the app.

user:	leogrn
created:	January 1, 2023
karma:	1