Three weeks ago, we announced that our payment processor, Balanced Payments, is going out of business. At the time, we said that, “we will have to change Gratipay in some yet-to-be-fully-understood fashion in order to survive the transition away from Balanced, and it will be hard.” We’re now beginning to understand the changes we have to make, and they couldn’t be harder.
Balanced is directing their customers to Stripe, and Stripe rejected us because they believe our model “qualifies as money transmission.” They followed up to specify changes we would need to make in order to use their service. These changes are drastic enough, but the suggestion that Gratipay might be regulated as a money transmitter is even more serious.
As soon as Stripe notified us of this possibility, we immediately beganresearching the issue, and we quickly hired a lawyer to help us understand our situation. Yesterday, we concluded that the concerns Stripe raised are real, and that therefore it would be both imprudent and immoral for us to continue processing payments as we have been. Unfortunately, we were unable to change course in time for this week’s payment cycle, and so, after 152 weeks of continuous operation, we are for the first time today skipping Gratipay’s weekly payment cycle.
Our intention is to quickly implement a revised model that is true to ourmission and compliant with regulations, and resume processing payments. However, a revised model will almost certainly exclude some of you who have been receiving money on Gratipay in the past. Simultaneously, we will work with regulators to resolve any past noncompliance, a process we’ve already initiated.
This really sucks for you, our users, especially those who have come to depend on the income you’ve been receiving through Gratipay. We’re deeply sorry for not discovering and handling this situation sooner, and we look forward to processing payments again as soon as possible.
If you have any questions please contact us privately via email, or publicly on this GitHub issue.