[Analemma_]

> Are there any promising avenues towards microtransactions that gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee? Or an approach that doesn't require one company to have a monopoly over it?

The short answer is, no. For the long answer, I really recommend people read a blog like Bits About Money or some Matt Levine columns to start learning about the actual plumbing of finance and payment processors, to see why such a thing is actually difficult or impossible to build. Something that seems like a simple transaction to us, like sending $0.10 to a webiste, actually involves many parties, all of whom are a) hedging against counterparty risk, b) required by law to do KYC/AML and c) required by law to have safeguards against leaving customers in the lurch. Providing a, b and c is expensive in both money and time.

There are a lot of layers of abstraction in this system to make sure that you, the end user, don't usually have to think about all the complexity, and so to you it just looks like "I sent money from A to B", but the complexity is nonetheless there and it's a real impediment to getting the kinds of fast, cheap microtxns you want.