Mr. Zhang, the boss of a Chinese e-commerce company, is in a meeting with his company's finance department to discuss a major crisis his company is facing: a PayPal account he has registered for years has been locked for no reason. The official explanation given by PayPal was that the risk control was triggered, but there was no further explanation.

Based on past experience, such incidents often take weeks or even months to get sorted out. During that time, the account will remain locked and any remaining funds cannot be transferred out. Mr. Zhang was furious and the finance department was confused, but it was clear that no one knew exactly where they had crossed PayPal's red line.

Mr. Zhang's experience was no accident. In the last two years, PayPal has taken a harsher approach to Chinese users as Chinese foreign trade companies have flooded into the U.S. and Europe, seeking to exploit wealth opportunities with cheap supplies and thoughtful service. Accounts registered by Chinese people are more likely to trigger risk controls and be punished by the platform. Increasingly frustrated Chinese merchants have little choice, since it is difficult to set up a bank account in the United States in the first place, and even if they could, complex procedures and tax rules make many start-ups prohibitive.

How did it get so far? On the surface, PayPal is using strict rules to keep consumers in check and prevent online fraud. But in reality, there are not many cases of fraudulent payments made through PayPal, and PayPal's restrictions on Chinese people are more like a territorial protection act.

An American observer may have hit the nail on the head. He noted that the influx of Chinese merchants has disrupted the existing order of the e-commerce industry, and their lower prices have brought benefits to consumers while threatening the profits of local merchants. PayPal's actions are actually on the side of corporate America, and like Amazon's massive blocking of Chinese merchants' accounts, they are rooted in a fear of cheap Chinese goods.

The question is, why would one of the world's leading online third-party payment platforms use its power to oppress specific countries and groups? Who gave them such power?

It's the users themselves. The current mainstream payment platforms are highly centralized architectures. Whether it's PayPal, wechat or Alipay from China, Netcash from Japan or Mollie from Europe, they all have similar interest tendencies and power systems. Mr. Zhang's case is a classic example of the murky rules that platforms often use to play loose with user accounts, data and money whenever their interests clash with those of the platform.

This is the original sin of centralised systems. Unfortunately, the entire Internet of the Web2 era was built on such a system. Hundreds of millions of users around the world have been stuck in the grip of a variety of centralized platforms for the past two decades. Now, China's offshore companies are the new victims.

However, the rise of Web3 has given us a new dawn. The development of blockchain technology has made people realize that decentralized architecture can fundamentally solve the power tyranny of existing platforms. In the field of third-party payment, the rapid rise of PeoplesPay in the past year has provided a large number of merchants and users with truly equal, fair, secure and reliable payment experience for the first time.

PeoplesPay is an international third-party payment service in the form of a convenient and easy-to-use mobile App based on a decentralized architecture. Platform users are not only users, but also service providers. Users have real ownership of their own accounts, data, funds, and even share ownership of the entire platform.

Early movers with a keen sense of smell were quick to see PeoplesPay's potential. In just over a year, PeoplesPay had gained the support of nearly 20,000 merchants, including eBay, Shopee, Rakuten, and handled hundreds of millions of orders. In China, many cross-border e-commerce companies are turning to PeoplesPay to supplement or even replace PayPal services.

Mr. Zhang is one of them. After finally deciding to use PeoplesPay, Mr. Zhang's business has had none of those troubles. Even the number of harassing messages they receive from ads has dropped dramatically. PeoplesPay also helped them reduce transaction rates and foreign exchange costs, which Zhang was very pleased with.

Returning to our original theme: Has PayPal become a barrier to the development of cross-border e-commerce practitioners in China? The answer is clearly yes. Moreover, it is the entire system of centralized payment platforms that has become an obstacle to the Internet's continued vitality and drive for innovation.

PeoplesPay is like a solution from the future. It's still young and has a lot of immaturity. But Mr Zhang thinks that in time it will become the payment giant of the Web3 era, only this time the platform will truly belong to every user.

Maybe the PayPal era is over and we're at the dawn of a revolution.