Introducing Groundhog

A crypto wallet and payment platform built to supercharge Ethereum e-commerce for consumers and merchants

Subscription payments — They’re the bedrock of SaaS, e-commerce, and more. Think Netflix, Spotify, Twitch, subscription boxes, your car payment, or your mortgage. Merchants rely on them, and consumers trust them.

And now, a whole new generation of people, projects, and companies are looking for a way to use these familiar subscription payment models inside the blockchain ecosystem.

But, believe it or not, recurring payments are difficult or impossible to do in the crypto space right now. The solutions that do exist are far from ideal. Most wallets can’t support subscriptions by design. And the use case is huge. By 2020, subscription e-commerce is estimated to reach $100 billion per year.

The future of friction-free subscription payments on Ethereum is here. Please allow me to introduce The Groundhog Network.

The Groundhog Network

The Groundhog Network is composed of:

The Groundhog Wallet, a multi-blockchain crypto wallet, browser, and hub for your decentralized life

and Groundhog Pay, a payment platform that lets merchants virtually anywhere in the world accept all types of cryptocurrencies including subscription payments over Ethereum.

Merchants can install Groundhog Pay by just adding a few lines of code to their website or app, and instantly start accepting recurring subscription payments on Ethereum (from anyone with a Groundhog Wallet), and one-time payments from any third-party wallet with ETH or the dozens of other digital currencies we support.

Technology and Features

How it works

Behind the scenes, we deploy a smart contract that acts like an escrow for your subscription payments. When you authorize a subscription by checking out with Groundhog and Groundhog Pay, that merchant gets whitelisted and permitted to pull your pre-authorized payment from your Groundhog smart contract under predefined conditions clearly established during the checkout flow — for example, I might authorize TokenClub to withdraw up to 0.5 ETH from my wallet once every month.

Non-custodial

With Groundhog, you’re the only one in control of your private keys. You can deploy and manage your Groundhog subscriptions with multiple devices, including our iOS or Android apps, a hardware wallet such as a Ledger, or a browser extension like MetaMask.

Retain full control

Smart contract logic ensures payments are only pulled when, how, and by whom they are permitted to. You can pause, change or cancel your subscriptions at any time.

And because you have your own dedicated smart contract holding your funds, you can easily verify your balance and transactions independently at any time.

Stablecoins

Some merchants want the flexibility of accepting cryptocurrencies while reducing exposure to their volatility. Groundhog will support stablecoins such as Dai, Basis, and Havven so that merchants can instantly settle into fiat or fiat-tracking currencies if they wish.

A new standard for recurring payments on Ethereum

We’re part of the working group developing ERC-948, the new proposed standard for subscription payments on Ethereum. With Groundhog, your crypto wallet will be able to act more like your credit card, and enable a whole new world of convenience and subscription models for users and companies.

We believe this will be a major advancement for the blockchain ecosystem and be critical for the continued adoption of cryptocurrencies as payments.

And recurring payments are only the beginning.

Tap, tap, token

We believe you should be able to acquire any token on any blockchain at any time, with a maximum of 3 taps. Groundhog offers a multi-blockchain wallet able to send and receive payments with full in-built exchange and access to any third-party decentralized exchange (DEX).

Enabling the Dapp economy

We’re enabling the Decentralized app economy. There are thousands of blockchain-based projects with their own proprietary tokens, but nobody has really figured out the rails of how users can easily acquire and spend these tokens in a friction-free way.

With our simple SDK, API and plug-ins, we allow Dapp developers to integrate Groundhog Pay into their platforms so users can easily access and spend their proprietary token without reinventing the wheel every time.

Smart widgets

We’re building smart widgets to let you view and access everything you’ll need in your new decentralized life, like WeChat for crypto. Authorize a new guest on your decentralized AirBnB widget, browse through your collection of Cryptokitties, rebalance your investment portfolio, or originate a loan.

Groundhog Operators

In the spirit of true decentralization, the Groundhog Network will run nodes called Operators in order to perform the ongoing smart contract calls necessary to run the network, including those required on behalf of merchants to pull payments. Anyone can be an Operator. Operators on the Groundhog Network are incentivized by a combination of

a percentage of the transaction fee

and/or Groundhog tokens.

Interested in being an Operator? Sign up for the waitlist at the end of this post.

Next Steps

We’re supercharging Ethereum e-commerce. Join us!

Join our Telegram channel,

Follow us on Twitter: @GroundhogPay,

and enter your email below to get the latest updates on the Groundhog ecosystem and claim your spot on the waitlist.

Who we are

Groundhog is a project of BlockCrushr Labs. We’re an award-winning blockchain venture development studio and a Techstars 2018 company. We’re also the team behind TokenClub — which is where we realized the need for Groundhog. Which is a story for another post!

Will you be having a token sale?

We have had quite a number of people asking us if and when we are going to do a token sale, and if so, how they can get on the whitelist. While we haven’t quite made that decision yet, if we do, precedence will be given to our Users, Merchants, Operators, and those on our mailing list and in our Telegram community.

Enter your email address above to get the latest news on Groundhog and we’ll ensure you’re reserved a spot.