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# Fiat Gateway
There are roughly 350 million cryptocurrency holders worldwide. Five years ago this number was less than 10 million. The next billion Web3 users are expected to arrive in the next 5 years, meaning that they currently do not have any working understanding of how Web3 works.
The Metaverse and the pursuit of the Everything App will open this up to the masses, meaning that we need to create a true gateway for Web2 users who do not know how to use wallets or send and receive cryptocurrencies. Becoming a true gateway is something many Web3 projects aspire to achieve but as a Metaverse platform we have the opportunity to not fully rely on the large incumbents of the ecosystem but build our own scalable infrastructures.
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This is why we delivered land purchases, followed by token purchases via credit and debit cards on the Next Earth platform. In the Next Earth Ecosystem, fiat payment will be available to most if not all businesses and Launchpad projects as a feature and benefit of integrating with Next Earth.
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As Next Earth is not a payment provider we integrated a trusted third party solution to our payment system. This is based on secure, cryptographically encrypted messages where Next Earth creates the encrypted message, sends it to the third party and when the fiat payment successfully happens the payment provider can mint the Land NFT for the user with the message and one of the smart contracts in the Next Earth Payment Contract system.
In this way the fiat payment is separated from Next Earth, Next Earth doesn’t know anything about the payment and the sensitive payment data, and the third party doesn’t need to know anything about the land creation process because it is coded into the message.\
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