Wampei Register
Peer-to-peer payments for businesses the banking system left behind
The problem
One of my last projects at Hawaii Information Consortium was a Bitcoin payment system, built on BitPay, for Hawaii's dispensary applications. The system was complete, but before we deployed it the Hawaii Banking Commissioner asked the legislature to require paper checks for dispensary applications, and we stopped the rollout. Wampei was a result of that exposure to the realities of cannabis businesses combined with my experience in mainstream electronic payments: it began as an electronic payments option for the cannabis industry, and electronic, cash-equivalent payments were the real unlock for businesses like these, and for anyone else traditional banking had left behind.
What I built
As co-founder and CEO (and de facto CTO), I designed and led development of a peer-to-peer, custodyless payments platform on AWS in Java and Python, supporting invoices, credit cards, cryptocurrency, and ACH. The regulated-workflow controls, security, reliability, and operational auditing, were built in from the start. I also ran customer and market discovery for the first iteration.
The exit
Following the acquisition, I transitioned Wampei's customer base to BRD (the mobile crypto wallet) with full continuity and data integrity.