Solana Labs, the company behind the Solana blockchain, has 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.
Solana launches its own payment method
Solana Blockchain (SOL) is kicking off February with a big announcement: it is launching “Solana Pay”, a solution that allows businesses to accept cryptocurrencies as a means of payment.
For the moment, Solana Pay allows to pay in USDC, SOL and also with other tokens somehow linked to the Solana blockchain such as FTX’s FTT or Serum’s SRM.
1/ Introducing Solana Pay, a decentralized, secure, and open-source payments protocol for the next generation of merchant payments SolanaPay https://t.co/mI2hMIh79G
– Solana (@solana) February 1, 2022
Solana Pay bills itself as a “decentralised, secure and open source” protocol, allowing instantaneous buyer-seller transactions for an average fee of $0.0005 per transaction. This is one of the major advantages for merchants, allowing them to bypass the usual Visa and Mastercard transaction fees.
In addition to online sales, customers will be able to go directly to shops and pay via QR codes from their digital wallets.
A scalable protocol
On the project’s GitHub page, it is indicated that Solana Pay could soon be implemented on the Shopify e-commerce platform, but also on WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, Wix and Squarespace.
Presentation of the Solana Pay interface
Solana Pay is open source, so developers will be able to shape the protocol in any way they want, as Sheraz Shere, head of payments at Solana Labs, pointed out in an interview with The Block:
If people can transact seamlessly on the blockchain as they could with cash, we think that will create interest and enable new innovations. That’s why the protocol is designed to allow developers to implement new things on the app. “
A collaborative project
Solana Pay was developed as part of a consortium led by Solana Labs alongside payment technology company Circle, fintech company Checkout.com and Citcon, a payment solutions development company. Phantom and trading platform FTX will also integrate Solana Pay with their respective digital wallets.
Circle, the company behind the USDC, will also allow merchants to create a Circle account through which they can convert their earnings into fiat currency.
“While Solana Pay will provide frictionless payment capabilities to Web 3.0 participants within the Solana ecosystem, we believe this protocol will transcend Web 3.0 and be revolutionary to the overall payments ecosystem in physical and online commerce.” – Sheraz Shere
After welcoming Binance and FTX into its own Portals Downtown metaverse last month, the Solana Pay announcement confirms the desire for the Solana blockchain to continue to grow on multiple fronts at once, and it seems to be working.
Indeed, the Solana blockchain has seen its SOL token rise to 7th place among cryptocurrencies in terms of market cap during 2021, which is currently worth around $110.
