A short, deliberately-incomplete note on a payment design we've been working on. The full architecture isn't public yet — but the shape of the problem and the shape of the answer are worth writing down now.
Card-checkout in 2026 is not getting better. Three things are dragging it down at the same time:
Anyone who runs a consumer checkout reads these numbers every day. The question is what to do about them.
Most consumers in 2026 spend more daily time inside a single messaging surface than inside any browser. Across our customer base, the pattern is obvious: hotel research happens in the browser; the booking decision often happens in a chat with a partner, friend, or assistant. The payment, today, gets routed back to a browser checkout. That last step is where the conversion drops.
The wedge is to remove that last step.
Imagine a payment confirmation that lives where the conversation is already happening. The customer doesn't change apps. The transaction completes inline. The receipt — including the on-chain carbon retirement we've already designed — lands in the same thread. The 3DS challenge happens, when needed, inside an environment the user already trusts.
Move payment to where the user is, not where the website is. The next conversion lift in consumer commerce isn't a faster checkout. It's a checkout that doesn't make the user leave the surface they're already on.
This is not "another wallet." Wallets ask consumers to learn a new app, manage a new credential, remember a new password. Most don't. The thing I'm describing requires no new app — it lives inside an app the user already has, already trusts, already opens twenty times a day.
This is not a stablecoin-only proposition either. The card networks and bank rails matter. Most of the world still pays with a card. The design has to accept cards on day one and add new rails as they mature. Stablecoins are coming on the wholesale side fast — they'll be a meaningful share of consumer payments inside three years — but not the only share.
This is not a closed-network play. The interoperability matters more than the closed loop.
We're keeping the implementation specifics off this page on purpose. There's a competitive gap right now and we'd like to keep it. What I will say is that we're co-designing this with messaging-platform infrastructure that has, as of late 2025, opened developer surfaces in ways that didn't exist a year ago. The technical primitives are ready. The product question is what to ship first.
For IMPT specifically, the order of operations is:
That's the operator path. The big-bang version where we shut off card checkout doesn't work — too many existing customers, too many regulatory environments to migrate at once. The roll-it-out-quietly version where the messaging rail becomes the new default works.
Three places people underestimate the difficulty:
None of these are dealbreakers. All of them are work.
I won't name them. Several teams across fintech and messaging are pushing on adjacent shapes. Some are building inside one closed ecosystem and won't interoperate; those will hit the same ceiling that closed-loop wallets hit. Some are building open standards; those have a chance.
Our piece of it sits on the merchant side — make sure that whatever rails the user prefers, IMPT can accept the payment, retire the carbon, and ship the booking. The rail is upstream of us. The conversion is downstream.
The reason this matters for IMPT specifically is that moving the carbon retirement to a place the customer already trusts compounds the integrity argument. The retirement event today is a public Ethereum transaction with an explorer link the customer can paste into their browser. Useful, but cognitively distant.
If the retirement event lands as a clean message in the same thread the customer just paid in — with the public chain-receipt link, the project they backed, the tonne retired — the loop closes. The customer sees the climate work as part of the conversation, not as a side-quest.
That's where the next leg of consumer-grade carbon comes from. Not from louder marketing. From a payment surface that delivers the receipt where the customer actually reads.
More on this — including specific implementation details — when we're ready to make it public. For now, this is the shape of the bet.
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