Episode
#129 Untangling: Permissionless Commerce w/ Siddharth Menon
- Podcast
- Untangling Web3
- Published
- May 6, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2317
- Processing state
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- https://rss.com/podcasts/untanglingweb3/2798202
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Summary
As the internet made information global and permissionless, payments have remained trapped behind banks, payment processors, jurisdictional rules, delayed settlements, account approvals, and platform-level restrictions. For online businesses, creators, developers, and emerging agentic commerce, the ability to accept money is still far less open than the ability to publish content or build software. In this episode of Untangling Web3, Siddharth Menon, founder of PayRam and co-founder of WazirX, explores how permissionless commerce can reshape the future of payments, stablecoin adoption, and blockchain-based financial infrastructure. The conversation covers why traditional payment systems create friction for merchants, how self-hosted crypto payment gateways unlock new forms of online commerce, and why the next wave of blockchain utility may come from payments rather than speculation. Key Points Discussed: Why Online Payments Are Still Broken: Traditional payments remain opaque, slow, and heavily permissioned. Merchants depend on payment service providers, acquirers, banks, and compliance processes that can delay settlement, freeze funds, reject accounts, or disrupt business operations when volume increases. In a borderless tech economy, payments still behave like a fragmented, jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction system. Permissionless Commerce and Self-Hosted Payment Gateways: PayRam is built around the idea that merchants should be able to run their own payment gateway, similar to running a WordPress site. Instead of signing up, completing KYC, or relying on a centralized processor to custody funds, merchants can accept blockchain payments directly into their own wallets, using self-custody infrastructure designed to reduce complexity and key-management risk. Stablecoins, Pro…