Patreon Temporarily Halts Payouts After 'Issue' With Payoneer System on Platform

Patreon yesterday experienced an outage. We still don't really have a lot of details but experienced some significant disruptions to their payments. So at least according to some users and creators and backers, they're seeing not just failed payments and they are seeing disconnections where people are getting their support lists wiped. People are getting uh taken off of the uh the the the roles to send monthly payments to individual creators because something in Patreon system apparently is making it look like credit card charges are fraudulent. Um And so you're getting just a big unwind in the system. There, a lot of people are reporting they're not receiving their regular payments and other people are are other sorts of problems. So we decided to highlight this just because at least from my perspective, I think this is a really good illustration of the the problems with current payment systems in terms of transparency and control. At the end user point, you're getting these disruptions because there was something mysterious that happened within Patreon and it's really messing with people's livelihoods, seeing creators who are saying like I can't make rent this month because this is happening. I mean, it, it is August 3rd. So we're right at that point, it's happening at a really bad time for some people. Um And you know, I I hate to, I'm not going to be the guy who says crypto fixes this, but at the very least there are alternative ways that this could be made more resilient and transparent. And I think we need to think about those Danny go for it. I will be the guy who says that crypto doesn't fix this. Right. First off, we need to know more about the specifics of this instance, but I should say we see cracking and Binance coin base every now and then they have little blips in their ability for people to deposit and withdraw tokens and those aren't always explained. Well, those sometimes usually it's fixed quickly but things break and it's not exactly, at least from my, I understand the situation at this point. Something that crypto can certainly fix when it comes to Patreon. So what I'm I will say that I agree with you, David. There is a lot of inherent trans transparency that comes with crypto payment systems that you can benefit from that. That let me clarify that the viewing public can benefit from not necessarily the people who are sending and receiving the payments when it comes to crypto. Well, I'll toss it to you now. Yeah, I think you're spot on here. We don't really know what's going on Patreon yet. So we'll have to wait and find out more details. It looks like they have two different problems on their hands and it's an online service. Things don't work sometimes. So we'll see. Maybe they need to turn off and on again. I think for crypto here, the question is, can micro payments work payments under $50 streamed online on the internet? There's a lot of different companies working on this, from lightning network developers to things like USC coin haven't panned out super well yet, but perhaps in the future. Not quite right now. Zach. Yeah, there's been a lot of noise. I think about, you know, how web three intersects with the creator economy. Right. And I think there's a lot of, um, you know, uh, slices of the creator economy for which web three might make a lot of sense, right. Um, things that are looked disfavor upon by various payment providers, whether that's sex work, whether that's um, uh, illicit substances, stuff like that. Right. Um, it hasn't really clicked yet because just the mass appeal isn't there in terms of the ability for people to send crypto payments. But it would be interesting to see if several of these instances ultimately move the needle on the web three created economy that's likely won't be this one, but we'll have to wait and talk about it another day.