Hi there Stackers,
I am Ray Marceau, CEO of Purse.io. Thanks for joining this AMA discussion, I am looking forward to this as it's my first one!
A little about me, well I just got back from two weeks in the desert at Burning Man. I went out early to help set up the city and break it down. My son even came for a few days! Another activity I have a passion for is rock climbing. I joined Purse in 2018 where I helped lead technical development, and I took over as CEO in April 2021.
Purse launched in 2014, being one of the first companies ever to make buying products with Bitcoin possible. We enable people to buy any product on Amazon with Bitcoin at a 5-33% discount. We have 200k+ users who have saved over $4.4 million dollars in total.
I’m excited to share that we released our Lightning Network integration recently, so you have access to purchase discounted Amazon products using Lightning! I was fortunate to have worked with Lightning Labs over the past year and learned much about integrating lightning with a huge e-commerce platform.
Besides Purse’s marketplace, our developers have also been contributing to open source development for Bitcoin over the past 8 years. Purse’s platform is built on Bcoin, which is a NodeJS implementation of Bitcoin. We believe that having codebases in different programming languages is crucial for Bitcoin to be more antifragile, so our developers were the first to release a NodeJS implementation (Bcoin), and a C implementation (Mako) is being worked on now.
Our motto since 2014 has been to Make Bitcoin Useful, and we’ve never been more excited about the future of Bitcoin as we are now!
The AMA will start on Tuesday (September 13th) at 10am (CT). Feel free to ask me anything!