The problem
Taking money is the part of a crowdfunding platform where mistakes are least recoverable. We needed three things that pull in different directions: US fiat payment methods, crypto on-ramp/off-ramp flows, and identity verification strong enough to satisfy regulators — without turning the pledge flow into a compliance interrogation that kills conversion.
Crypto made it harder in a specific way. A card payment can be refunded; an on-chain transfer cannot. Any flow that moves value on-chain has to be correct the first time, which means the hard work sits before the transaction, not in error handling after it.
What I owned
I implemented the US payment methods and the crypto on-ramp/off-ramp flows on Stripe and Bridge, and integrated Persona and Bridge for KYC. Alongside that I built the embedded wallet connections, smart contract interfaces and blockchain transaction workflows across multiple networks.
Decisions and tradeoffs
Identity verification was the interesting design problem. The obvious implementation is a gate: verify before you let anyone near a payment. That is simple, defensible, and it costs you a large fraction of your users at exactly the wrong moment.
Instead the verification requirement was staged against what the user was actually trying to do, so identity checks were demanded at the threshold where they became legally necessary rather than at signup. The cost is state: the system has to know, per user and per action, what level of verification has been satisfied, and every payment path has to consult it. That is more moving parts than a single gate, and it is the kind of logic that must not drift, so it belonged in a shared module rather than at each call site.
For the embedded wallet work, the tradeoff was custody-versus-friction. Embedded wallets remove seed-phrase onboarding, which is the single biggest drop-off in any crypto flow, at the price of a heavier trust relationship with the wallet provider and a harder migration story if you ever want to leave.
Outcome
Fiat and crypto rails ran side by side in a live platform with KYC and KYB verification in the path, and contributors could pledge without managing a seed phrase. The same payment work extended into a Shopify integration for Karma Automotives, implementing pre-order with crypto through custom apps and Liquid templates.