# The Problem

Crypto has produced global liquidity, but not yet global spendability.

Millions of users around the world hold digital assets. They earn in crypto, trade in crypto, save in stablecoins, and participate in on-chain economies. Yet when they try to spend those assets in ordinary offline life, they still hit a wall. The path from holding crypto to paying a local merchant remains unnecessarily fragmented.

## Friction on the User Side

For most consumers, the current crypto spending path is broken into multiple actions:

1. move assets to a supported exchange or wallet,
2. convert them into a usable fiat or card balance,
3. navigate withdrawal or top-up flows,
4. and only then make a purchase.

This is inefficient for the user and incompatible with daily payment behavior. The more steps required before a payment can occur, the less likely crypto becomes a practical spending tool.

The result is that many users treat crypto as a reserve asset they can someday spend, rather than as a balance they can confidently use today.

## Resistance on the Merchant Side

Merchants face a different problem. Most of them do not want to change their existing payment workflows. They do not want to install new hardware, manage on-chain assets, or worry about volatility, wallet security, custody, tax treatment, or staff education.

This is rational. Merchants optimize for reliability, operational simplicity, and settlement certainty. Any crypto payment model that requires them to become crypto-aware creates immediate adoption friction.

In many markets, especially in Southeast Asia, merchants already have working QR payment systems connected to their local banking and settlement environments. Asking them to replace those systems is strategically weak. The winning model is the one that fits around existing merchant behavior, not against it.

## A Broken Interface Between Two Worlds

At a structural level, the problem is not that crypto lacks value. The problem is that crypto liquidity and local commerce rails are not natively connected.

On one side is Web3:

* borderless assets,
* programmable transfers,
* stablecoins,
* on-chain identity,
* and globally addressable liquidity.

On the other side is offline commerce:

* local merchants,
* domestic QR standards,
* fiat-denominated pricing,
* local banking rails,
* and operational expectations shaped by daily business.

Without a translation layer between the two, payment remains awkward.

## Why Existing Crypto Payment Approaches Fall Short

Many existing crypto payment models solve only part of the problem:

* cards abstract the experience, but depend on card infrastructure and often hide weak merchant relevance,
* merchant crypto acceptance tools can expose merchants to new operational complexity,
* exchange off-ramp flows help users exit crypto, but do not create a native spending experience,
* and crypto-native checkout solutions often work better online than in offline high-frequency commerce.

These models do not fully address the specific conditions of QR-first local commerce networks in Southeast Asia.

## The Real Problem to Solve

The key challenge is not simply enabling a crypto payment. The challenge is enabling it while preserving the integrity of how local commerce already works.

A useful solution must satisfy all of the following at once:

* a user can pay from digital assets,
* a merchant can keep existing QR rails,
* settlement happens in local fiat,
* the user journey is short and intuitive,
* the merchant journey is unchanged,
* and the network can scale across markets with different local standards.

That is the problem Terminus is designed to solve.
