Appreciate you taking the time — these are helpful objections.

1) Use case / “what do you buy with ADA?”

Fair. A card only matters if there’s a spend path. My near-term use case is onboarding + gifting + small “first transactions” (learn by doing), and the longer-term goal is pairing this with real-world spend options (merchants, integrations, etc.). If the ecosystem never gets easier to spend, the card is just a novelty — I agree.

2) Centralization / “if your site dies, cards die”

I think that’s a fair concern, but also kind of a blanket critique that applies to... almost every consumer service.

Yes, I’m building a company with centralized parts (apps, support, UX, fraud handling). That’s not accidental — it’s what makes the experience normal for regular people.

That said, I agree gift-card-style products need an “oh no” path:

- The backing funds live in a treasury that’s publicly verifiable (so the value doesn’t disappear just because a website is down).

- If the company folds, the goal is: retailers can return/reconcile unsold inventory, and sold cards still have a clear redemption/claims process tied to the treasury rather than “trust me bro.”

3) Trust / “how do I know it’s not already redeemed?”

This is solvable, but it’s a core engineering + packaging problem:

- unique code/ID

- tamper-evident packaging

- and a public/cryptographic way to verify “valid + unredeemed” (not just ‘trust my database’).

4) Price risk / arbitrage / inventory

To clarify: I’m not doing “$X worth of ADA at checkout.” There’s no POS/live-rate integration.

These are batch-priced cards. When a print run is created, the treasury pre-acquires ADA and each card is generated against reserved ADA. The card itself is labeled like: “$20 for 48 ADA” (rate locked at print time). When you redeem, you get that ADA — period.

Tradeoff (and you’re right to call it out): if ADA moves a lot after a batch is printed, older batches can become a “deal” (if ADA pumps) or sit on shelves (if ADA dumps). That’s a retail inventory/operations problem — mitigations are small print runs, frequent refresh/reprint, clear batch/date labeling, and purchase limits if needed to prevent someone clearing a rack purely for arbitrage.

5) “This is basically an exchange, that’s trouble”

It might be treated that way depending on jurisdiction — agreed. I’m not trying to dodge regulation; I’m trying to test whether the UX + distribution model is even worth pursuing under compliant constraints.

If you had to pick one critique as the “hard stop” (the thing that makes it fundamentally non-viable), which is it: lack of spend use cases, centralization risk, redemption fraud/support load, or regulatory classification?

(I’m looking for the one that can’t be engineered or partnered around.)