“The merchants don’t want the banks either — that’s the alignment no one talks about. Look at what Kroger did. They pulled out of Visa. The retailers are on the good side.”Alex Adelman, co-founder and CEO of Lolli, should know. After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2011, the entrepreneur started Cosmic, an e-commerce gateway “with the idea to democratize commerce, allowing anyone to buy anything anywhere,” he told Bitcoin Magazine. The company, after an initial acquisition by PopSugar Inc., would end up in the hands of e-commerce cashback giant Ebates, and Adelman and his CTO, Matt Senter, would stay on staff after the buyout.Now, the duo are taking their experience working at Ebates and their original dream to “democratize commerce” to a new network of technology and clientele: Bitcoin.From Cash Back to Sats BackWhile working at Ebates, Adelman told us that he learned "why people buy, how people use cashback programs" — the hows and whys that would eventually lay the foundation for building Lolli's bitcoin-back platform.From craft beer memberships to VPNs to clothing, you can shop for just about anything on Lolli, though Adelman says travel is the most popular category (this is perhaps due to the fact that most airline booking sites, like CheapOAir, which accepts crypto as payment, give a flat rate in bitcoin back rather than a percentage).Like Ebates’ own model, Lolli’s is ...
