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This smells of identity verification. They offer a payment mechanism which needs to be legally compliant.

Bingo! Social credit system with verified ID.

The crypto part is just to make sound hip.

When you get banned from Facebook for talking about whatever you can't buy or sell on the Internet anymore because you don't carry "the Mark". They are a private company so they can deal with whomever they want. You can still use cash. These tech companies want it so that if they ban you they can really screw up your life. Just look at people who have their whole Google existence wiped out because of some random policy violation.

It's called "cloud feudalism". Amazing how accurate that term is, during feudal times, the king was free to change their terms, and if you disagreed you could shut up or get out of the kingdom, which was a difficult process and meant cutting off ties with people and business partners (or letting them know about your change of address). And if the king said "You, you did something I disliked, out!", you could protest all you want but that would fall mostly on deaf ears.

Of course "deaf ears" is nowadays support emails being handled by copy-pasting bots.

WeChat payment for westerners.

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