Solana Pay is the new decentralized payment gateway between merchants and customers that could compete with PayPal for fast and low-cost transactions.
Solana Pay: the payment gateway for merchants and customers
It was early February when Solana Pay was announced on Solana’s Twitter account:
2/ Launching today, Solana Pay makes it easy for merchants worldwide to accept digital dollars like $USDC, and any other #Solana SPL Token, for a fraction of a penny and without any intermediaries
“Introducing Solana Pay, a decentralized, secure, and open-source payments protocol for the next generation of merchant payments
Launching today, Solana Pay makes it easy for merchants worldwide to accept digital dollars like USDC, and any other Solana SPL Token, for a fraction of a penny and without any intermediaries”.
Essentially, Solana Pay allows a customer to make a payment for a product by scanning the QR code from the merchant’s point of sale, performing a transaction as quick as sending an email and at almost zero cost, while also starting to earn high-yielding interest.
And in fact, immediately after the payment, the customer receives two tokens in his wallet: an NFT of his purchased product to use in the metaverse he wants, and an authenticated NFT receipt that gives him access to the online community of lovers of that verified product.
Solana Pay: payments as fast as sending an email
Solana’s new app accepts USDC and other digital assets. In this regard, Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle, had shared his tweet:
“Instant merchant focused payment experience with USDC on Solana, with Solana Pay, an open toolkit for any to enable USDC payments that settle in less than a second with a transaction cost of less than a cent”.
Hence the challenge to PayPal, which includes a 3.49% fee plus a flat fee for its checkout. Moreover, with PayPal, merchants have to wait for transactions to be settled through the bank.
With Solana Pay, on the other hand, there is no middleman and transactions are carried out at a cost of less than a cent.
Within a month, the first demonstration of Solana Pay in a Las Vegas shop had made the rounds on Twitter:
“Check out the worlds first Solana Pay transaction at featurelv at Wynn Las Vegas. Making #solana history!”
The price of SOL has collapsed
SOL’s price follows the bear market
Despite Solana Pay’s brilliant release in early February 2022, SOL’s price continued to follow the bear market that affected the entire crypto market.
Indeed, from 20 January 2022 onwards, SOL has plummeted from $143 to $83. At the time of writing, the ninth-largest crypto by market capitalization is worth $81.
Yet the Solana Blockchain projects continue to develop. At the end of February, Slope Finance, the startup developing a wallet for the Solana blockchain, closedan $8 million Series A funding round.
