Solana blockchain facilitates crypto-currency payments

A global reference in Blockchain technology, Solana has established itself, since its creation in March 2020, as a challenger to Ethereum, with its own crypto-currency: Sol. To further strengthen its position and accelerate its deployment against the competition, Solana has just launched a new point-of-sale payment acceptance service. In particular, it intends to distinguish itself by focusing on payment in stablecoins.

FACTS

• The new offering presented by Solana Labs is a solution for accepting payments in crypto-currencies and stablecoins (Sol and USDC in particular).

• Called Solana Pay, it is based on a new open-source decentralised payment protocol, intended for all merchants operating an online shop or a physical store.

• The system is based on QR codes and the use of a mobile wallet to validate peer-to-peer payments between a buyer and a merchant.

• Customer journey :

  • A customer equipped with the Solana wallet enters a shop,

  • he scans his QR Code to validate a purchase transaction,

  • the funds are immediately transferred to the merchant's Solana account.

• In terms of responsiveness, Solana Pay is said to be capable of processing up to 60,000 transactions per second (close to the 65,000 announced by Visa).

• For merchants, the use of this system promises the deployment of new value-added services in the near future. In particular, Solana Pay is intended to offer to manage loyalty programmes integrating NFTs, for example.

CHALLENGES

• A specific integration of stablecoins that contributes to the originality of the Solana Pay solution. Solana's founders are asserting their ambition to create new payment rails to pay in digital versions of stablecoins, starting with the digital dollar (USDC), which currently accounts for 4 billion dollars of transactions on Solana's blockchain. This is how Solana hopes to contribute to the democratisation of crypto payments.

• The promise of low cost: Solana's main argument to promote its new service is pricing. Blockchain promises that minimal fees will be instantly applied to each transaction made via its service.

• Blurring the boundaries between the virtual and real economies, as initiatives to bridge these worlds multiply. Solana is embracing this trend with an innovative solution, enabling crypto-currencies to find new and broader uses.

MARKET PERSPECTIVE

• Sol has become the fifth most valuable crypto-currency on the market ($59 billion), according to Coingecko. Solana also recorded 1.48 billion transactions last November, according to CoinMarketCap. Recognition of Sol is widespread; in January, a note circulating within Bank of America stated that the company had the potential to become the "Visa of the digital asset ecosystem".

• The spread of crypto-currencies in the physical world is underway thanks to the initiatives of a number of alternative players, who have created payment methods that allow transactions in the physical world to be carried out with crypto-currencies. In addition to Solana, Mastercard and Ledger have demonstrated this through dedicated cards.