Solana Labs, the creator of Ethereum’s competing high-speed programmable blockchain, started February with a bang with the launch of Solana Pay. This payment platform is to provide merchants and customers with a new set of decentralized payment standards and protocols designed to enable direct acceptance of stablecoins, such as US Dollar Coins (USDC), at point-of-sale (POS) and in line.
According to the company, Solana Pay should allow merchants to accept and move any amount of stablecoins compatible with the Solana blockchain, at any time of the day, anywhere in the world, but with very low transaction fees – measured in fractions of cents. The company says merchants can have real-time access to their money, with increased working capital management capability, liquidity and liability protection, and direct access to their money in seconds, without intermediary and without retention period or bank transfer fees.
Solana management believes that by establishing a direct connection with a blockchain wallet address, merchants can unlock a two-way communication channel with their customers, which will allow them to perform transactions such as sending offers, the granting of NFT and the loyalty reward.
Certain advantages for merchants
Solana Pay’s competitive advantage is that its decentralized payment structure is extremely fast thanks to the Solana blockchain, which offers 65,000 transactions per second (TPS) scalability, 400 millisecond “near-instant” settlement, and incredibly low fees of $0.00025 per transaction. In comparison, bitcoin can only process seven TPS and Ethereum only 13 TPS.
According to Solana’s senior management, the initial development of Solana Pay came from a variety of sources, including Solana Labs, global fintech company Circle Internet Financial, digital wallets Phantom and Slope Wallet, mobile wallet payment processor Citcon, cryptocurrency exchange FTX and national passenger vehicle rental company Bandago Van Rental.
Another competitive advantage of Solana Pay is its ease of use – as simple as activating a barcode at a merchant’s site or at the point of sale. So, for example, using the Solana Pay SDK, a merchant can initiate a peer-to-peer connection with the millions of cryptocurrency wallet customers who can pay in stablecoins like USDC or other blockchain-enabled cryptocurrencies. Solana, the company adds. It remains to be seen what ways Solana can bring to the table to encourage larger merchants to adopt its new payment platform, as well as more point-of-sale providers and e-commerce platforms.
Source: ZDNet.com