Solana Pay launched today, providing merchants and consumers with a new set of decentralized payment standards and protocols to enable direct acceptance and settlement of digital dollar currency, such as USD Coin (USDC), at the point of sale and online.
Solana Pay ushers in new commerce capabilities and the ability for merchants to accept and move any volume of digital dollar currencies compatible with the Solana blockchain at any hour, anywhere in the world, for disruptively low fees measured in fractions of a cent.
Solana Pay was developed as a decentralized, open peer-to-peer protocol with the initial support of Solana Labs, Circle, Checkout.com, Citcon, and digital wallet integrations from Phantom and FTX and Slope.
Solana Pay is now available for wider adoption and customization by ecosystem participants – including large and small merchants, ecommerce platforms, POS providers, and a broad array of payment service providers – who want to define the next generation of payments. For more information, merchants should go here and developers should go here.
“Solana Pay gives merchants a new, simplified framework to transact with their customers, enabling them to accept and settle funds directly with no intermediaries, zero fraud liability, and processing fees measured in fractions of a cent,” said Sheraz Shere, Head of Payments at Solana Labs. “Solana Pay transforms outdated one-way transaction models into powerful, two-way merchant-to-consumer relationships, giving brands and retailers a direct channel to surprise and delight their customers in new ways.”
Solana Pay’s Advantages
Solana Pay is as simple as enabling a barcode on a merchant’s site or at the point-of-sale. Using the Solana Pay SDK, a merchant can enable a peer-to-peer connection to the millions of consumers with crypto wallets who can pay in dollar digital currencies such as USDC and other Solana-compatible crypto currencies.
At launch, merchants can use Solana Pay to accept and near-instantly settle USDC at the point of purchase. With more than $49 billion in circulation as of February 2022, USDC is one of the world’s fastest-growing dollar digital assets and offers a safe and frictionless way for users to transfer value on the blockchain.
With Solana Pay, merchants get real-time access to their money and greater ability to manage working capital, liquidity, more liability protection, and direct access to their money within seconds, with no intermediaries, no holding periods or bank transfer fees. Also, by establishing a direct connection to a blockchain wallet address, merchants unlock a bi-directional communication channel with their customers, allowing them to send offers, grant NFTs, reward loyalty, and much more.
Solana Pay’s decentralized payments structure is built on Solana, which provides scalability (today running at 65,000 transactions per second), close-to-instantaneous settlement (now at 400 milliseconds), and disruptively low fees (currently averaging $0.00025 per transaction).
The new Solana Pay SDK, point-of-sale client, and reference implementations provide options for merchants of all sizes. Enterprises who run their own checkout flows can begin building integrations right now. Solana Pay’s point-of-sale client makes it easy for small restaurants, shops, food carts, and more to accept digital payments for fractions of a penny.
Solana Labs’ Shere sees Solana Pay’s introduction as the first step upon which the entire merchant commerce ecosystem can build and evolve further. “A revolution in merchant payments is happening now in ways that weren’t possible before, enabled by Solana’s unique differentiators of speed, scalability, security and cost,” he said. “We are enabling money to move the way data is transferred on the internet – instantly, peer to peer, and with negligible marginal cost.”
