Elrond Bets Big on Crypto Payments With Acquisition of Utrust

Elrond Foundation is betting big on Web3 payments in 2022 with the acquisition of leading crypto payments provider Utrust.

Elrond, the creators of the low-coast 100,000 transactions per second (tps) blockchain, has announced the acquisition of Utrust, a leading cryptocurrency payment solution in the market.

Elrond is making a bold bet on crypto payments gaining greater traction as the sector matures. Elrond sees payments being made faster, cheaper and more secure by using blockchain technology. It is also focusing on reducing costs for merchants – but more than that, turning those costs into an income stream for merchants.

Elrond’s blockchain technology high bandwidth, low latency, inexpensive blockchain will serve as the backbone for a new, financial system with the goal of becoming accessible to anyone anywhere. 

If you are just getting started with crypto – read our beginner’s guide to cryptocurrency.

Instant transactions, buyer protection, crypto-to-cash settlement

Elrond claims that its Utrust acquisition will make it the first crypto payment solution to offer instant transactions, buyer protection and crypto-to-cash settlements.

The goal is to first make payments fully natively digital by using blockchain to offer near-instant and secure global settlements at a trivial cost, accessible to merchants worldwide, and second, to bring powerful DeFi mechanics into play to create a paradigm shift via Merchant Yield products.

“At their best, payments should happen near-instantly, globally, and at a trivial cost. Enabling this for merchants worldwide is our primary goal’” said Beniamin Mincu, Elrond Network CEO.

Mincu continued: “The second product we will be working on together with the newest member of the Elrond family is Merchant Yield, a DeFi-first payment processing solution that will provide yield for merchants, instead of requiring them to pay a percentage of the transacted value. The implications are hard to overstate.”

Payment processors still offer slow settlement times, and charge merchants anywhere between 3% – 11% of each transaction, an amount that is often the difference between profitability and bankruptcy for a lot of businesses worldwide.

Opening up revenue stream for merchants

By using state of the art blockchain technology to make payments fully and natively digital, Elrond and Utrust aim not only to increase the settlement speeds and significantly decrease the costs associated with receiving a payment, but transform them into a scalable revenue stream.

Merchants will be able to bring more of the multi-trillion dollar crypto market into their business and earn on every transaction they receive, instead of paying for it.

“The idea of payments turning from a cost into a revenue stream sounded as crazy to us as it does to anyone thinking about it for the first time.

“After exploring this together with Elrond, we not only realized that this is possible, but also that it is the inevitable future of payments. So we decided to join forces and accelerate the implementation of DeFi payments,” said Sanja Kon, Utrust CEO.

Elrond blockchain is internet-scale

Elrond describes its network as an internet-scale blockchain, designed from scratch to bring a 1000-fold cumulative improvement in throughput and execution speed.

To achieve this, Elrond introduced two key innovations: a novel Adaptive State Sharding mechanism, and a Secure Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithm, enabling linear scalability with a fast, efficient, and secure consensus mechanism.

Elrond can process upwards of 15,000 tps, with 6-second latency, all at ultra-low cost.

Utrust is the leading cryptocurrency payment solution. It is designed to modernize the financial and payments industry and solve the problems of traditional payment methods by enabling immediate transactions, buyer protection, and instant settlements for merchants. 

Read more: