Show HN: Peanut – A Modern Money App
peanut.meHi HN! I’ve been frustrated with traditional payments for a while. Paypal has frozen my funds on two occasions; and in one of them the funds were never recoverable. When I’m not using PayPal, international bank transfers take days and charge me insane amounts.
Also, every country usually has their own payment app parallel to the banking system: Portugal, where i currently live, has MB WAY, Brazil has PIX, Argentina has Mercadopago, the US has Cashapp. None of these work with each other.
Money still feels like pre-dotcom era tech when it should feel like a whatsapp message: send instant, anywhere, and for free.
Me and my team have been building Peanut to make money feel like Whatsapp. Peanut is a payments app, like Cashapp, but it works in any country. On top of that, you do more than only instant Peanut to Peanut payments; Peanut works with Banks, Peanut works with apps like MercadoPago and Pix, and if they have none of that, Peanut also works with crypto.
We wanted to build Peanut the right way, and that’s why:
- We’re not published on any app store. Peanut is a Progressive Web App (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_app) (of which I sadly see way too few !!). This way we don’t have to bow to the Apple/Google tech cabal and can rely on open standards. - The core of peanut is decentralized & non-custodial. The only one that has control of the funds is the user; as it should be. Peanut is not like a traditional bank, where fraud, political instability, or a bank-run might pwn you. Your funds are always yours and no one else can touch them. - Your funds are secured by passkey. This is much harder to crack or extract than a password or pin, and you won’t get pwned if your seed phrase gets leaked. We think it’s a much better approach for consumers. - Trust is crucial; all the app code is open-source at https://github.com/peanutprotocol/peanut-ui/tree/peanut-wall... - The app is completely free; we only passthrough banking costs. The way we intend to make money is off of merchants in the future. We believe Visa and Mastercard take a way too big of a chunk of payments, and we can be competitive with them.
My personal favorite feature that we’ve built: generate a send link, drop it in a chat with the person you’re talking with, and let them receive it in whatever option they want (no questions asked!).
We’re still in Beta, so I hope you can forgive any tech hiccups. We’re also rolling out country support on a week-by-week basis; by the end of October we should have full EU, US & LATAM banking coverage. But I wanted to launch Show HN early, because I respect this community a lot and have always loved getting feedback from it (and often giving my own!).
Also, let me know your username and I’m happy to send you a few $ to play around with the app.
Just to show how easy it is to send/receive money with Peanut, here's a few links with $2 each.
(they are only claimable once, so please be courteous and don't claim all, leave some for other users!)
1. https://peanut.me/claim?c=42161&v=v4.3&i=5778#p=ms74xIbdGVSK...
2. https://peanut.me/claim?c=42161&v=v4.3&i=5779#p=G7V82WybXthy...
3. https://peanut.me/claim?c=42161&v=v4.3&i=5780#p=Rgpymby5wBbO...
4. https://peanut.me/claim?c=42161&v=v4.3&i=5781#p=6F5nKWjx2Kf6...
5. https://peanut.me/claim?c=42161&v=v4.3&i=5782#p=DtdJ0y2Ufayu...
neat technical sidenote: to stay non-custodial, the "key" parameter in these links is after a # hash. This ensures servers don't actually see this link-secret and steal the funds!
The way we intend to make money is off of merchants in the future. -> Is this on the website? Couldn't see it anywhere and that makes it a big nono for me
No, the landing page communicates customer fees (which are 0 for peanut to peanut flows and pass through for banking flows). We're very transparent with any FX or fees users experience.
I'm not quite sure I understand the logic of mentioning future merchant monetization plans on the landing page?
Also, to expand on this a bit more:
Currently merchants get kind of shafted by VISA/Mastercard. Not only do they have to wait until they get their funds (sometimes even up to two weeks!), which is horrible for a business where cash flow is important, margins low and float very tight; they also pay huge fees on top!
Depending on geo, these fees can go from 1-3% (total) to >6-8% in geos like Argentina and Brazil (and even worse in some other places). That's insane.
Whilst stablecoin & blockchain adoption is not fundamentally impossible for Visa/MC (see this post for more info https://x.com/uwwgo/status/1973038511897923848), it is still a very long way off, and we expect to be very competitive, especially with sovereign nations pushing their own alternatives that we interoperate with (PIX, Mercadopago, DUITNOW, MB WAY etc)
Well, as a potential end customer, I want to know why I can trust you. You product is free, and you're handling my money. You telling me your revenue model is through merchants gives me the confidence you're not gonna pull me a weird one.
Could be as simple as "But how do you make money then" in the FAQ.
hmmm that's a very fair point on the FAQ! Will add it
Let me know when Brazil + Pix is supported. The feature I have not seen in any of these websites that transfer money between countries is the ability to schedule reoccurring payments. I send money to my family monthly, and it would be nice if I didn't have to do the same exact process each time.
We're literally adding it this week! Give me your email or some place to reach you, i'll notify you
You can also try the dev build at https://staging.peanut.me but it's quite unstable atm
Doesn't seem to work in Firefox on Linux when I follow the TRY NOW! link and get sent to /setup. Ironically it asks me to copy the link and open it in my browser.
Unfortunately Firefox rarely has passkey support; so our whole auth system sadly doesn't work on that browser. In the future we'll add multiple auth methods. But for now you can switch to Brave, Chrome or most other Chromium browsers
Apologies!
hey kkonrad here, biz cofounder at peanut. really cool to start seeing users on this. esp proud of this being open source and a PWA despite many having advised against this.
I actually really like the website. Do you support US also, or just EU (Portugal?)? Thanks!
Thanks! Do you like the flashy design, or the actual UX of the app?
US and EU banking rails are both fully supported!
how do you handle (or plan to handle) exchange operation types?
That's an excellent question and has a lot of nuance to it. In principle there's ~200 countries in the world, and most of them have their own currency, which leads do 200^200 = 40_000 exchange rates in the world. More even; most currencies have wildly different exchange depending on what exchange you are actually using and how much liquidity that exchange has.
In practice, most currencies are actually liquid against the American dollar; and maybe a few other major coins. This is mostly a technical issue, since liquidity is fragmented and it is just easier to trade against what you know everyone else has: the all-dominant US Dollar [1].
Now, enough theory, how do we do it at Peanut?
Currently, all user balances at Peanut are dollarized; that means users hold USD stablecoins. This is a deliberate simplification; in the future, we plan to roll out other stablecoin support (especially important for Europeans. The rest of the world is pretty happy with holding USD).
When we have to do an exchange to a local currency, like Argentinian Pesos, we work with a local exchange provider. They are able to give us the best exchange rate, because we go directly from a USD-like stablecoin (USDC or USDT usually), to their currency.
For them, USDC & USDT are functionally equivalent to hard cash, and they price it accordingly. They also get it IMMEDIATELY; they don't have to wait multiple days until settlement and until we wire them the funds from some American or European Bank. This is much better for us than for other fintechs like Revolut or Wise; they have to have their own liquidity (and all the infra, compliance, and legal that that entails!)
In the future, I expect our exchange rates to get even better. As foreign exchange continues to grow ON chain, liquidity on chain will increase; until it is the largest (and thus CHEAPEST) exchange in the world.
[1] Note: with the slow end of Pax Americana under the current US regime, the adoption of US Dollar has actually been falling somewhat; replaced by sovereign nations and funds actually holding more gold instead of usd . That's also why we've seen gold at all time highs
thanks for the answer
maybe my question wasn't clearly written, sorry
I meant how are you planning to handle different exchange operation types like on this example situation:
when you send or receive international transfers in Brazil and you exchange it for BRL you need to declare what is the nature of the exchange operation you are doing
if you are receiving for services that you provided, if it's a transfer from an account you own, if it's a donation, the list goes on
this is important because of the different treatment each of them receive on compliance, risk and even fees
ah, it seems i completely misunderstood your question.
I think there's two angles here: personal accounting for the user, and compliance for us as a company.
From a user perspective, it's your own responsibility to classify your transactions when you do your accounting, wether you're an individual or a business. So if you get paid via Peanut, you need to say if it was a donation, friend payment, income, etc.
From our own perspective on compliance, risk and fees, it depends a lot on what provider we're working with and in what jurisdiction the operate on. Sorry if that's not a satisfying answer ("it depends"); happy to go into more detail if you have a specific example in mind