Solana Debuts Payments Protocol With Circle’s Assistance

Solana now has a decentralised payment scheme of its own. Solana Pay will enable users and businesses to make payments and sales using digital assets such as Circle’s USDC stable coin.

Solana Labs has announced the creation of a decentralised payments system aimed at retailers and consumers.

Solana Pay is a peer-to-peer service that enables businesses and consumers to receive and transfer Solana-compatible digital assets such as USDC at any time and from any location. It is powered by the Solana blockchain and was built with the assistance of Solana Labs, Checkout.com, Circle, and Citcon. The service will be integrated into Phantom and FTX’s digital wallets.

Solana Pay is aiming its efforts at e-commerce platforms, payment providers, and a diverse range of merchants. To begin utilising the service, retailers must activate a barcode that allows clients to pay with their bitcoin wallets.

In a press statement, Sheraz Shere, Head of Payments at Solana Labs, emphasised Solana Pay’s revolutionary peer-to-peer technology and low-cost capabilities. He said, “The solution converts outmoded one-way transaction patterns into robust, two-way merchant-to-consumer connections, providing brands and merchants with a direct avenue to surprise and excite their consumers in new ways.”

The ability for retailers to communicate with clients through crypto wallets has the potential to revolutionise the game, allowing for the distribution of NFTs, exclusive discounts, and loyalty reward tokens, among other things. As the sector has blossomed in the past year, NFTs have been regarded as an innovative tool for increasing brand interaction, and Solana Pay hopes to make it simpler for merchants and brands to discover new ways to connect with their audience.

According to Circle’s Jeremy Allaire, the introduction of Solana Pay was “a significant step toward expanding access and use for businesses and consumers interested in participating in the fast growing environment for the next generation of payment technology.”

While the Circle-issued stablecoin USDC is expected to be the principal medium of exchange on Solana Pay at launch, many additional Solana-compatible digital assets might gain popularity on the system in the future with the support of Phantom and FTX. Circle’s backing for the product is the latest in a series of significant steps in the payments area, which began last year with partnerships with Visa and Mastercard.

Solana Pay is based on Solana, a high-performance smart contract blockchain that has been compared to Ethereum. It claims to be capable of processing up to 65,000 transactions per second and settling in less than 400 milliseconds. Additionally, Solana charges exceptionally minimal transaction fees, with the average cost per transaction now hovering around $0.00025. These technological benefits aided in its spectacular ascent in 2021; the SOL token soared from $1.50 at the start of the year to roughly $260 by the end of the year. It has now fallen to $107 after a market-wide sell-off.

Also read: Indian Budget 2022: Crypto Tax Clarifies Markets, But Not Everyone Is Pleased