Sounds a lot like the Matrix chat protocol. Who’s using a private Matrix server?
I feel like a lot of these companies think they’ll handle the bootstrapping stage with economies-of-scale from having one central node; but in practice, having that one central node enables extra network effects (e.g. super-low-latency interactions with people on the same node) that make people resistant to eventually becoming more distributed.
I think WordPress.com represents a better model: it’s a first-party hosting provider, but everyone that signs up is signing up for their very own instance. (Maybe some things are shared under the covers—that’d certainly be good engineering—but everyone gets full control of their WordPress “engine”, with their own plugins, scheduled tasks, etc.) This way, people are used to the concept of these blogs being a loosely-federated network with pingbacks et al from the start, rather than everything being one server with one dashboard. Very easy from there to “lift” your instance out into a separate enterprise deployment; very easy for other cloud providers to spring up and offer you an import tool, to move “your server” from service X to service Y.
Background: Persona was a centralized, Mozilla-run auth service designed to bootstrap a decentralized protocol. In theory, after the protocol was widely adopted, Mozilla could shut down the centralized service. In practice, nobody adopted the protocol and the whole thing collapsed when Mozilla shut down the service.
I think the whole endeavor would have been more successful as self-hosted software. The downside is that each website would require separate email verification (until the protocol got adopted), but it would have been far less confusing to everyone and it most importantly it still would be running today. On the other hand building shrink-wrap cross-platform software is a lot harder than running a service and publishing some javascript, so I understand why they did what they did... but here we are dead in the water.
I would love to see Persona revived as a self-hosted auth library someday, and actually think it could still be successful in that role. It encapsulates the whole verify-your-email step; it leverages several existing federated login solutions to skip the roundtrip; it could still revive the decentralized protocol.
I haven't looked at this Payment Request API and I'm as skeptical as anyone, but if it doesn't rely on any kind of centralized service, it at least has a chance.