Solana’s Payments Protocol Solana Pay Launches For Digital Commerce
Solana Labs has released a P2P (peer-to-peer) payments protocol Solana Pay to enable merchants accept crypto payments directly from consumers.
The currencies supported on Solana Pay include Circle’s USDC stablecoin, but also Solana-related assets such as Solana’s native SOL, FTX’s FTT and Serum’s SRM, among others. Transactions will be instant and merchants will receive “real-time” payments.
Head of Payments for Solana Labs, Sheraz Shere commented:
“Merchants and consumers want a frictionless experience without taking on unnecessary volatility risk, and consumers don’t necessarily want to transact with their investments.
If people can seamlessly transact on-chain just like they do with cash, we believe that will spur interest and create new innovations which is why the protocol is designed to allow for developers to build new commerce experiences on top of it.”
A joint collaboration
Solana Labs has developed Solana Pay in joint collaboration with Circle, Checkout.com, and payments processing company Citcon, and with digital wallet integrations from Phantom, FTX, and Slope.
Solana Labs also collaborated with Shopify to enable crypto payments to their merchants via Solana Pay, but that integration isn’t live yet.
To a question whether Solana Pay is planning to compete with payment giants like Visa and Mastercard, Shere replied that Solana Pay is “trying to change the whole paradigm of payments to one that puts merchants in control by creating rails that are decentralized, permissionless and P2P and enable new commerce experiences in web3.”
“We’re very confident that the core protocol developers in the ecosystem will continue to enable the network to serve hundreds of millions of users and support scalable use cases like merchant payments.”
Solana Pay is also planning to launch a number of payments-centric hacking events this year in a bid to connect the global community of developers and whitehats with their technological infrastructure.
