The Problem We Were Actually Solving
We launched our product in Venezuela, where we quickly realized that accepting traditional payments would be problematic. Our initial solution relied on PayPal's mass payout feature, but that was short-lived. They suspended our account due to some minor compliance issues, and we lost access to our users' funds. This led to a perfect storm of bad PR and unhappy customers. At that point, we knew we had to find an alternative payment infrastructure that could handle the complexities of the Venezuelan economy.
What We Tried First (And Why It Failed)
Our first attempt at replacing PayPal was to integrate Stripe. However, upon further research, we discovered that Stripe's compliance requirements wouldn't allow them to operate in Venezuela due to various sanctions and embargoes. We then turned to alternative payment gateways like PayU or Mercado Pago, but their requirements were still too restrictive, and the fees were prohibitively expensive. It seemed like the more we tried to comply with traditional payment processors, the more we realized how little they cared about our niche market.
The Architecture Decision
