Solana Labs, the company behind the Solana blockchain, has just unveiled “Solana Pay”, a payment solution for merchants to accept cryptocurrencies in their online stores, but also physically via QR codes. The protocol already offers to settle transactions in USDC or SOL.
Solana launches its own payment method
The Solana blockchain (SOL) is kicking off February with a big announcement: it is launching “Solana Pay,” a solution that allows businesses to accept cryptocurrencies as a means of payment.
For now, Solana Pay allows for payment in USDC, SOL and also with other tokens somehow linked to the Solana blockchain like FTX’s FTT or Serum’s SRM.
Solana Pay bills itself as a “decentralized, secure, and open source” protocol, allowing for instantaneous buyer-to-seller transactions for an average fee of $0.0005 per transaction. This is one of the major advantages for merchants, allowing them to bypass the usual Visa and Mastercard transaction fees.
In addition to online sales, customers will be able to go directly to stores and pay via QR codes from their digital wallets.
An evolving protocol
On the GitHub page of the project, it is indicated that Solana Pay could soon be implemented on the e-commerce platform Shopify, but also on WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, Wix or even Squarespace.
Since Solana Pay is open source, developers will be able to shape the protocol in any way they want, as Sheraz Shere, head of payments at Solana Labs, pointed out in an interview with our colleagues at The Block:
“If people can transact seamlessly on the blockchain like they could with cash, we think that will generate interest and enable new innovations. That’s why the protocol is designed to allow developers to implement new things on the app.”
A collaborative project
Solana Pay was developed in a consortium led by Solana Labs alongside payment technology company Circle, fintech company Checkout.com, and Citcon, a company that specializes in developing payment solutions. Phantom and trading platform FTX will also integrate Solana Pay with their respective digital wallets.
Circle, the company behind USDC, will also let merchants create a Circle account through which they can convert their earnings into fiat currency.
“While Solana Pay will provide frictionless payment capabilities to Web 3.0 participants within the Solana ecosystem, we believe this protocol will transcend Web 3.0 and be revolutionary for the overall payments ecosystem in physical and online commerce.”
– Sheraz Shere
After welcoming Binance and FTX into its own Portals Downtown metaverse last month, the Solana Pay announcement thus confirms the desire for the Solana blockchain to continue to grow on multiple fronts at once, and it seems to be working.
Indeed, the Solana blockchain has seen its SOL token propel itself to 7th place among cryptocurrencies in terms of market capitalization during the year 2021, which is worth around $110 currently.
