Fast tried to build PayPal
Jordan Gal, CEO of Rally, on building the Switzerland of checkout
Fast was not just selling a nicer button, it was trying to own a reusable shopper identity layer across the open web, which is where payments businesses get very powerful. The goal was to let a shopper save card and shipping info once, then recognize that shopper at many merchants later, so checkout gets easier every time and the network gets more valuable with each new buyer and store. That is the same basic flywheel that made PayPal so important, with eBay giving it the early distribution needed to solve the chicken and egg problem.
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Fast used an express payment method model, meaning merchants added it as another checkout button alongside PayPal, Apple Pay, or Affirm. That made adoption easier at first, but it also meant Fast only captured a small slice of each merchant's payment flow, so it needed a huge merchant base to become economically meaningful.
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The core prize was not payment processing alone, it was the shopper vault. A company that stores recognized shopper identities can autofill checkout across merchants, raise conversion, and later layer on more products around payments, financing, fraud, and merchant tools. Bolt pursued the same network thesis, while Shop Pay had an easier path because Shopify already controlled checkout for a large merchant base.
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Fast struggled because this model is brutally hard without built in distribution. Internal research found Fast generated only about $50K in 2021 revenue while burning about $10M per month, and external reporting confirms it shut down in April 2022 after modest revenue growth and high burn limited fundraising options.
The next phase of checkout keeps moving toward fewer manual forms and more recognized shoppers, but the winners are more likely to be the companies that already control checkout traffic or embed deeply in merchant workflows. That favors platforms like Shopify and large payment networks like PayPal, while independent players have to win by owning more of the full checkout flow, not just adding one more button.