Let me elaborate on what’s involved here and how it looks (assuming US)
Customer has money in USD. Storj prices service in USD. Storj has a way to accept said USD and pay 1-3% commission to the credit card provider. Or surcharge the customer, or use ACH for free. Either way, this is a solved problem.
Instead:
- Customer has money.
- Customer has to create coinbase account, go through KYC.
- Customer has to fund coinbase account from their bank (free in US at least, but takes a few days, unless you trust Plaid and/or stripe, which is another layer of nonsense)
- Customer obtains their storj ERC20 deposit address from storj portal, and has it handy
- Customer buys STORJ tokens at ask price on the market. Coinbase handles complexity and charges about 1% of value for the trouble.
- At this point the value is at the mercy of token volatility, hence, having the deposit address handy.
- Customer sends the token to their storj account deposit address. This involves a transaction cost and can also vary wildly, depends on ETH gas fee. Coinbase also hides this complexity from you, including the need to have ETH in your account for gas… but it’s still there.
- Storj receives tokens and immediately “sells” them, or more likely stashes the tokens into their pile and credits your account the current market value of the tokens sent in USD at the time of deposit. Plus 10%, for your troubles.
Of course that $50 is punitive. But so is this nonsense. And yet, because competition is so much worse – they will get away with this.
It’s the principle “we don’t need to be the best, we need to be better than competition” at work here. I wholeheartedly despise this principle, but this is the world we’ve collectively shaped.
The key here is that this is not a price hike. It’s a message. Price increase goes into storage plan rates and conditions.