TL;DR: we are about to have our USD account in US bank open and linked to paypal. It's taking more time than expected. Once that's done we will launch.

Hi there,

... well, it's a good question. What's going on? Here is where we are at the moment:

Being a Canadian corporation, we had relatively no problems getting our Canadian banking in order, including a USD account. That being said, it took two attempts. First attempt with a different bank did not work out because of their CRAZY policies. Need to see a lawyer to confirm identity? I don't think so.

Setting up Stripe and linking it to our USD account took a bit of time (they need to check our identity), but is now complete. No issues there.

Our plan includes setting up a bank account in a US bank as well. Why? So that we can link it to Paypal (read on) and other partner service. Most of the times, such services do not work with USD accounts in Canadian banks. The choice of bank is also very deliberate: it needs to have strong relationship with a Canadian bank so it all works like a single system for us. Setting up an account in US bank is still in progress. It is moving on well, but is way slower than we expected because of the fact that we are a Canadian company and we have founders on both sides of the border. Signing, mailing paperwork, electronic paperwork... We expect it to be completed next week. Plus the time to set up internet banking. Yes, it involves RSA tokens.

After reading an re-reading Paypal's rules we determined that we can use paypal for sending the money, but we cannot use paypal for receiving money. In order to fund our paypal transactions, we need to link it to USD account in US bank. See above.

We are accepted as partners by TranswerWise, however, same issue, US bank account is needed to fund USD transfers.

We are in progress of being verified by one more very promising payout partner that could solve worldwide payouts. Their legal department is taking their sweet time. So far we have received positive signals from them, but no final approval. I am optimistic about it.

There are many exciting payout companies out there, but we just don't have the required numbers to partner with them yet.

If somebody says that we should have started the process earlier, I would tend to agree. Ah, hindsight... Frankly, it took a ridiculous amount of time to even set up what we have. I am somewhat disappointed, but it's a great lesson. Nerds meet bureaucracy. Nerds beat bureaucracy.

The team used this pause to take a bit of a break from super active coding. Personally, I was able to re-connect with the family and re-charge the batteries before the busy launch time. Some dev work is still going, mostly fixes and small improvements, and tying up loose ends. We would like to see CS launch before we start with the second wave of features.

As soon as we have a solid cash out method, we will be opening the doors. Most likely it will be paypal. Most likely time frame - 1 to 2 weeks.

Thank you for sticking with us, everybody. We are almost there.

/u/tdb2