Dwolla‘s network facilitates the movement of real money with a focus on real-time payments without using plastic cards.
In our last internal hackathon Brenton and Andrew built something they called Flashy Map. Here’s how to look at the video above:
- Orange lines = Dwolla transaction
- Red lines = Withdraw from the Dwolla network
- Green lines = Deposit into the Dwolla network
In short, the video above simply visualizes where the money is coming from and where it went to. To give you an idea of how many merchants are involved in this take a look at the spots map.
When digging around I realized that Dwolla actually serves more merchants in the US than Starbucks has locations, globally. Not bad.
Dwolla merchants and consumers using the Dwolla network transact without spending 2-3% on interchange fees and it doesn’t cost anything to get money in or out of the network.
Dwolla is simple and has a tremendous number of applications from CSA’s, to state government, to sports leagues, and freelancers. All of which use the network. With credit we’re seeing some new things from eCommerce stores as well.
Things have come a long way and this visualization was a cool way to see where the first ~$500MM in transactions came from. I thought it was absolutely worth sharing.