Hey community. Been quietly lurking in the interledger community, learning as much as I can. It’s all really interesting, especially the web monetization side, and the coil business model makes sense. I see how there would be a lot of opportunities to expand on their model and built on it. Additionally, it seems for web monetization to grow it would be advantageous for there to be more providers.
My question is; is there any other reason why there aren’t more providers that have come up since Coil launched? Is there something I’m missing or is it as simple as Web monetization is a relatively new concept?
Hi Zach,
I can think of two ways to become a WM Provider today:
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- Charge people a subscription fee and stream your own money to WM enabled sites;
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- Let people deposit money into an account and send their money to WM enabled sites.
As soon as we have finished implementing Rafiki (which implements Open Payments), there will be also a third option:
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- Connect to people’s wallets and send money out of their accounts.
Option (1) requires a lot of infrastructure to be set up and I think a lot of people are hesitant to do that as long as WM has not really taken off.
In addition to the infrastructure, option (2) requires you to be licensed as a money transmitter so that is a big obstacle to overcome.
I do believe that there will be more WM providers implementing option (3) as soon as the tech is in place because it is much easier than the other two options. It requires way less infrastructure to be set up and also doesn’t need a license.
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Thank you for the reply! Regarding the third option, I agree, it also seems to give less friction to the user. A follow up to your answer, Any idea when you’ll have Rafiki set? I’m aware of the test environment.
We are planning for some time late Q2/ early Q3 2022 but don’t ping me down to that 
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