Solana Labs, the company behind the Solana blockchain, has just unveiled “Solana Pay”, a payment solution for merchants to accept cryptocurrencies in their online shops, but also physically via QR codes. The protocol already offers the ability to pay for transactions in USDC or SOL.
According to the company, Solana Pay is intended to allow merchants to accept and move any amount of Solana blockchain-enabled stablecoins, at any time of day, anywhere in the world, but with very low transaction fees – measured in fractions of a cent. The company says merchants can have real-time access to their money, with enhanced working capital management capability, liquidity and liability protection, and direct access to their money in seconds, with no intermediaries and no hold periods or bank transfer fees.
Solana’s management believes that by establishing a direct connection to a blockchain wallet address, merchants can unlock a two-way communication channel with their customers, allowing them to conduct transactions such as sending offers, granting NFTs, and rewarding loyalty.
Solana Pay’s competitive advantage
Solana Pay’s competitive advantage is that its decentralised payment structure is extremely fast thanks to the Solana blockchain, which offers 65,000 transactions per second (TPS) scalability, 400 millisecond “near-instant” settlement, and incredibly low fees of $0.00025 per transaction. By comparison, bitcoin can only handle seven TPS and Ethereum only 13 TPS.
Another competitive advantage of Solana Pay is its ease of use – as simple as activating a barcode on a merchant’s website or at the point of sale. So, for example, using the Solana Pay SDK, a merchant can initiate a peer-to-peer connection with millions of cryptocurrency wallet customers who can pay in stablecoins such as USDC or other Solana blockchain-enabled cryptocurrencies, the company adds. It remains to be seen what Solana can bring to the table to entice larger merchants to adopt its new payment platform, as well as more POS providers and e-commerce platforms.
