🚀Market opportunity
The opportunity for Web3 payments
“Digital payments is a +10T market with double-digit growth driven by emerging payment technologies such as blockchain payments. We believe a sizeable share of transactions will be executed on blockchains in the coming decade, creating a multi-billion dollar revenue opportunity. Helio is leading the way with their API and simple UI that makes it easy for anyone to integrate in minutes and process Web3 payments without any prior blockchain experience" - David Zwagemaker, Partner at Peak.
Top down view
Digital payments is a giant, fast growing market. In 2021 there were ~900b digital payments growing at a CAGR of 19% driven by next-gen payment methods (BNPL, biometric, invisible, crypto, etc).
So what share of digital payments will be executed on a blockchain in 5, 10, or 20 years?
Even at a low single digit percentage, we’re looking at a +$1b revenue opportunity (assuming a conservative take rate of ~0.5%). We believe the share will grow past double digits within 10 years and a sizeable portion of these transactions might feel like a Web2 style UX to consumers with blockchain under the hood.
Another way of looking at TAM is in terms of number of merchants that accept payments online:
According to CapGemini recent payments report, 45% of business customers expect to be accepting crypto by ‘27
Even a small share of this serviceable market will deliver $10b in payment volume (e.g. we serviced ~1000 merchants for a few quarters & delivered ~$25m in volume to date). By comparison, Stripe reached +3M merchants in a decade
Some market observers believe the payments market is too competitive and expect powerful incumbents like Adyen or Stripe to take the emerging Web3 payments share. Our view is very different. If you look at previous payment innovations, such as internet payments, BNPL, biometric, etc. they rarely come from incumbents. Stripe, Checkout.com and some others have ambitions in crypto but these are largely focused on on/off ramp and custodial capabilities. Helio's unique focus on DeFi and making native blockchain payments awesome is uniquely differentiated and the most promising opportunity within the payments landscape.
Bottom up
Our thesis is that an initial focus on Web3 merchants (i.e. dApps, NFT creators, degens, etc), albeit still a small/niche market, offers the quickest product-market fit and an attractive path to transaction growth. We grew quickly to +1,000 merchant customers and reached 50,000 users, with an annual run-rate Total Payment Volume (TPV) of ~$25M, in a very tough bear market. Our goal is to quadruple our TPV to $100M within the next 12 months, and we have identified four key areas of growth.
Growth areas:
NFT sales (~$25B market) → we’re still in very early innings here and see significant demand for NFT pre-sales, OTC and other NFT business models on ETH, Solana, Poly and beyond
Web3 economy → subscription payments, invoicing workflows, e-commerce, deposits, token-swapped payments for dApps, P2E gaming, degens, creators, and more. We believe in a world where 100s of million of people will be fluent with a Phantom, MetaMask or other wallet
Marketplaces ($1.5T) → our GTM strategy is to build integrations into Web2 marketplaces to slowly but surely position the Helio checkout UX next to PayPal, Stripe, Klarna, etc. We have some fantastic early examples:
Discord subscriptions bot (+200 servers use our bot)
Bizzabo integration for event ticket sales
Custom Shopify integration (see example here)
WooCommerce plug-in
Creators (~$100B) → Web3 payments are ideal for digital goods sales and part of our vision from day is to optimise Helio to power content paywalls & P2E models with Helio Play
“We were instantly excited by Helio’s focus on digital content as an emerging use case for Web3 payments. A crypto wallet can also act as a portable digital identity, meaning creators can eliminate sign-ups from their checkout flow. At the same time, users can instantly unlock and pay for content with a micropayment and a single tap of their wallet saving 2-3 minutes it would take to sign up and pay over traditional, expensive card rails. That level of friction is completely removed with Helio”. ”, Sam Harrison, Managing Partner at Lightspeed Faction.
We can only succeed in these growth areas if we build an amazing product with a defendable "moat" based on sustainable platform differentiators.
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