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How GetBlock unlocked new markets with new payment methods

"Now Paddle handles all the work around sales taxes and VAT on our behalf. That's great for me as a lawyer – it means I can sleep well at night." - Nelly P, Head of Legal

The company

Launched in 2019, GetBlock has established itself as one of the world’s largest blockchain infrastructure providers and has been recognized as one of the innovators driving forward Web3 adoption.

With GetBlock, teams of crypto applications don’t need to run their own blockchain nodes. Instead, they can seamlessly connect to blockchains via ready-made API endpoints. 

Through its free and paid packages, GetBlock offers access to testnets and mainnets of over 50 blockchain ecosystems, including Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon, Bitcoin, and Dogecoin. It provides a range of solutions, including hosting custom private nodes or using shared nodes.

The challenge

As it began its active growth stage, GetBlock wanted to make it as easy as possible for its customers to access its services. However, the way it was handling its payments was holding it back. 

“Due to organizational issues and the industry attitude, we could not facilitate more than 50% of the payments via fiat money which is regular government-issued currencies,” explains Nelly, GetBlock’s Head of Legal. 

“However, regulations were tightening, and many of our customers were keen on using fiat money which was our primary goal as well.”

If a client requested a fiat payment, we would have to sign a contract and then they could make the payment via bank transfer. This made onboarding very complicated. It relied on a lot of human processing.

Ellen Specter, Chief Business Development Officer, GetBlock

The company also needed to be able to manage sales tax and VAT on an international scale which required a lot of operational effort. 

“We didn’t have the capacity to handle sales tax ourselves,” Nelly says.

Taxes vary from country to country. In the US, they vary from state to state. It’s too complex, and we are working worldwide. It would require us to recruit a finance team that was much bigger than our developer team – and that doesn’t make sense at an operational or organizational level.

Nelly P, Head of Legal, GetBlock

The solution

GetBlock sought a simple payments solution that would allow it to facilitate payments, including flexible subscriptions, in fiat money and offload all the admin of sales tax at the same time.

After a review of the market, GetBlock discovered Paddle, a global payments and subscription management platform that acts as a merchant of record (MoR).

Following a speedy onboarding process backed by Paddle’s technical team, GetBlock was able to offload its tax and compliance burden completely and offer exactly what customers had been wanting.

The results

 Increased revenue 

“Not only have we been able to attract back many of the customers who wanted to pay with fiat money, but we are also reaching new users in countries we never used to sell to,” Nelly says. 

This has helped GetBlock to grow its audience and its revenue with the new payment options proving to be popular.  

“Now, between 70 and 80% of the payments we receive are in fiat money.”

Not only have we been able to attract back many of the customers who wanted to pay with fiat money, but we are also reaching new users in countries we never used to sell to.

Nelly P, Head of Legal, GetBlock

Reduced costs 

GetBlock has also used Paddle’s seamless subscription management function to shift to a subscription model. 

 “Customers can now choose from a range of subscriptions – either one, three, six, nine or 12 months,” Nelly says. 

The benefits of this are threefold: it has increased customer loyalty, cut billing costs, and improved inventory forecasting. 

“We can now budget far more accurately,” Nelly says. “We wouldn’t have been able to offer subscriptions without Paddle.” 

Less risk 

“Now Paddle handles all the work around sales taxes and VAT on our behalf,” Nelly says. “That's great for me as a lawyer – it means I can sleep well at night.” 

Being able to accept different payment methods from customers all over the world and not worry about managing sales tax keeps the team focused on constantly improving their products and the customer experience. 

That’s already being seen in the new onboarding process which is far more straightforward for new B2B clients. 

“We can just create an invoice and share it with clients,” Ellen says. “It couldn’t be easier.” 

“Now we don't need to go through the legal complications of negotiating and signing contracts with single clients, mostly in the B2C segment, so they can pay in fiat money,” Nelly adds.

Now Paddle handles all the work around sales taxes and VAT on our behalf. That's great for me as a lawyer – it means I can sleep well at night.

Nelly P, Head of Legal, GetBlock

The future

This is just the start of GetBlock’s growth with Paddle. 

“We are now one of the top five blockchain infrastructure providers in the world, and we plan to keep growing by increasing our customer base,” Ellen says. 

And that path toward the next milestone is a lot more straightforward with their payments, subscriptions, sales tax obligations taken care of. 

GetBlock CEO, Arseniy Voitenko, adds that Paddle has streamlined payments logistics and advanced risk management and helped set the company up to scale. 

Adding Paddle instruments looks like the most profound and useful upgrade for our payments module in months. Their solution offers an entirely new level of flexibility and security for various categories of GetBlock's audience. Besides the “immediate” effects in terms of user experience, the implementation of Paddle's tooling paves the path for a new level of regulatory and tax compliance in all regions where GetBlock operates.

Arseniy Voitenko, CEO, GetBlock

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