Solana Pay launches to expand crypto e-commerce market

Published at: Feb. 1, 2022

Solana Pay is a peer-to-peer payments infrastructure designed to enable the global market of online merchants and point-of-sale providers the ability to accept and settle payment transactions in a panoply of digital assets.

A joint collaboration between Solana Labs, Checkout.com, Circle and Citcon, in addition to wallet integrations from Phantom and FTX, the platform’s inbuilt software development kit acts as an intermediary between traditional fiat-centric businesses and the cryptocurrency sector, promising to promote wider engagement and adoption from traditional consumers.

In an exclusive statement, Solana Pay revealed that they perceive the “most prevalent use-case to be with digital dollar currencies” such as Circle’s USDC stablecoin, but also are enabling the option of Solana-related assets such as Solana’s native SOL, FTX’s FTT, and Serum’s SRM, among others.

Built upon Solana — a blockchain that launched April 2019 and quickly became regarded for its high-speed and fraction-of-a-cent transaction fees — Solana Pay is seeking to provide a low barrier-to-entry crypto payment alternative, as well as the possibility for integration of emerging asset classes such as nonfungible tokens, or NFTs.

Cointelegraph spoke exclusively to the Head of Payments at Solana Labs, Sheraz Shere — formerly responsible for co-creating the Google Wallet — to discuss his anticipations for Solana Pay in supporting the wider growth of the Solana ecosystem throughout 2022.

Shere revealed that the platform “leverages Solana’s unique differentiators of high throughput, low cost and scalability”, before stating that:

“While Solana Pay will provide frictionless payments to Web3 participants in the Solana ecosystem, we believe this protocol transcends Web3 and will be transformational for the payment’s ecosystem across physical and online commerce.”

In an interview with Cointelegraph on Dec. 22, Head of Communications at Solana Labs, Austin Federa, spoke on topics of recent network outages such as that of mid-September — an incident that was attributed to denial-of-service attacks — the benefits of scalability and questions around centralization of nodes, among others.

Shere noted that Solana Pay is dedicated to supporting the onboarding process of merchants throughout the coming year, irrespective of their prior education, concluding that:

“We anticipate a growing understanding amongst mainstream merchants about the benefits of stablecoins and digital dollars.”

In addition to this, Solana Pay is also expected to launch a series of payments-centric hacking events this year in a bid to connect the global community of developers and whitehats with their technological infrastructure.