
#129 Untangling: Permissionless Commerce w/ Siddharth Menon
From Untangling Web3 by Jack Davies & Alec Burns
May 6, 2026 · 39 min · Season 1 · Episode 129
About this episode
Siddharth Menon discusses how permissionless commerce can transform the future of payments and financial infrastructure.
As the internet made information global and permissionless, payments have remained trapped behind banks, payment processors, jurisdictional rules, delayed settlements, account approvals, and platform-level restrictions. For online businesses, creators, developers, and emerging agentic commerce, the ability to accept money is still far less open than the ability to publish content or build software. In this episode of Untangling Web3, Siddharth Menon, founder of PayRam and co-founder of WazirX, explores how permissionless commerce can reshape the future of payments, stablecoin adoption, and blockchain-based financial infrastructure. The conversation covers why traditional payment systems create friction for merchants, how self-hosted crypto payment gateways unlock new forms of online commerce, and why the next wave of blockchain utility may come from payments rather than speculation. Key Points Discussed: Why Online Payments Are Still Broken: Traditional payments remain opaque, slow, and heavily permissioned. Merchants depend on payment service providers, acquirers, banks, and compliance processes that can delay settlement, freeze funds, reject accounts, or disrupt business…
People in this episode
Hosts: Jack Davies, Alec Burns
Guest: Siddharth Menon
Topics covered
- permissionless commerce
- payments
- blockchain
- stablecoin adoption
- financial infrastructure
Keywords
- online payments
- crypto payment gateways
- traditional payment systems
- merchant operations
- blockchain utility
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: PayRam, WazirX
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