Let’s take a dive into Solana Pay, an on-chain payment system built to create a greater merchant-to-consumer relationship by making transactions cheaper, simpler, and more efficient.

Solana Pay is a new blockchain based merchant payment system bringing privacy and decentralization to businesses and consumers by cutting out intermediaries and using crypto.

Specifically USDC, a digital asset pegged to the US Dollar created by global fintech firm Circle.

Circle allows businesses to take advantage of digital currency in payments and treasury applications on the internet.

The Circle APIs connect the existing fiat system, credit cards, bank accounts etc with custody, security, blockchain management and other things that are needed to use that and integrate that into your own applications.

This revolutionary payment method allows merchants to accept payments from consumers with a simple scan of a QR code, or a click of a button online.

Solana Pay involves the same basic principles as Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay, but instead of connecting to your traditional bank account it connects to your chosen cryptocurrency wallet to trade your stablecoins for goods at the speed of sending an email.

With the removal of intermediaries such as Apple Pay and Stripe you also remove the risk of these companies gathering/selling your data and losing it in the action too.

Solana Pay makes its statement with its near zero cost transaction processing system powered by Solana.

By using Solana’s blockchain technology, their payment service is currently able to operate at upto 60,000+ transactions per second.

This is a giant leap in the right direction for normalising crypto payments in everyday life as before this, payments received in crypto have been met with several problems….

For starters, Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain processing times have taken minutes if not longer to settle payments in the past, and especially when shopping online, every second a consumer spends waiting means a higher risk of transaction abandonment.

Pair that with the high gas fees in which Ethereum is currently dealing with, consumers could also look at paying over an extra $50 just to buy a bunch of bananas from the store or a phone charger on Amazon.

Not a wave that anyone wants to ride.

Also, businesses on the whole don’t want to deal with volatile currencies such as BTC and ETH. Apart from a few, most would like to deal in US dollars or something equivalent.

So to solve that problem, Solana Pay has met merchants in the middle by introducing them to USDC.

By using USDC to settle payments, merchants can rest assured that their currency they’ve just been paid in won’t fluctuate in price like Bitcoin and Ethereum etc, instead it will keep the same value of the US dollar that many are used to already.

On top of that, the USDC transferred by consumers is received into the merchants crypto wallet at the speed of the internet, as opposed to Visa/Mastercard payments which can take upto 3 business days to process and reflect in your available credit.

These traditional payment methods also cost businesses 1-3% of each transaction (even more for contactless card payments).

Businesses can use Circle’s APIs to automatically create new addresses for each payment they receive, they can then track that payment to a given payee.

Once the USDC is received, it can instantly be put to work for you with yield farming (lending/staking your money in which you receive interest on your total value).

Otherwise it can be moved to your traditional bank account by using an automated API that pushes a wire.

However, in removing the intermediaries from the transaction sequence itself, that doesn’t mean that these companies don’t have a role to play anymore… There are still jobs to be done that merchants may not want to do themselves such as setting up token accounts, doing treasury management, reconciliation and integrating into legacy bank accounts.

Solana Pay plans to release a confidential token API that can provide additional layers of data privacy to accompany their already many technological solutions that cater to whatever level of privacy the merchant is looking for.

They have integrations with hugely popular wallets already including:

• FTX (https://ftx.com/)
• Phantom (https://phantom.app/)
• Slope (https://slope.finance/)
• + more on the way

Businesses can get started via Solana Pay’s simple physical point of sale web app, which has an easy onboarding set up and an e-commerce SDK also that works with your own websites to support QR codes and browser plug-ins. More information on this here.

Having a Circle account allows you to open an account with multi-user support and administration so you can add employees or people in your finance department to it.

There are many teams already building integrations and protocols that will help speed up the adoption of Solana Pay… below are some examples:

Projects Building on Solana Pay:

pocketpay.finance have built a Non Custodial Mobile wallet designed to bridge the gap between e-commerce and DeFi

aten.app offers a seamless onboarding experience for merchants who wish to accept Solana Pay

solpay.store has built a WordPress plugin that allows e-commerce stores to instantly take Solana Pay as a checkout option. The plugin is already live and available within the official WordPress Plugin directory.

mtnpay.so has developed the first point of sale system which accepts Solana Pay and it integrates with Square: