Solana announces Solana Pay allowing merchants to accept SOL payments

Solana Labs, the developer team behind the Solana blockchain, announced Solana Pay, a new point-of-sale (POS) payment product that lets merchants accept crypto payments with near-instant finality and affordable fees. The payment solution is billed to be a game-changer that will help merchants interact directly with their customers by rewarding customer loyalty in a unique way.

Sharez Shere, head of payments at Solana Labs, revealed in a blog post a new payment solution for merchants that is being built on the Solana blockchain. By his words, Solana Pay will enable merchants to interact with their customers on a truly “peer-to-peer” basis. Solana Pay will also allow merchants to accept the USDC stablecoin, SOL, the native token of the Solana blockchain, and other tokens instantly without any intermediaries and with low fees.

Solana Labs head added that the vision behind Solana Pay is much bigger than just allowing merchants to accept crypto payments. Solana Pay will incentivize new business models where merchants can personalize offers for customers, have on-chain loyalty programs, as well as offer their customers unique virtual goods in the form of NFTs to accompany physical purchases.

As per Shere, merchants should benefit from all of the advantages that on-chain decentralized payments can provide, such as network cost savings, DeFi yield generation, zero fraud liability, instant settlement, and ownership of the customer relationship.

To develop the payment solution, Solana Labs partnered with Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, Checkout.com, and payments processing company Citcon. Solana Pay will have digital wallet integrations from Phantom, FTX, and Slope. In addition, other payment providers are welcome to integrate Solana Pay on their platforms.

Despite the fact that the Solana blockchain recently faced network congestion challenges, Sheres claimed that the new payment solution would not be troubled by this. Even now, the core developers of the Solana blockchain were working on supporting scalable use cases for the blockchain. Sol is currently trading at $109, up 3.19% in the last 24 hours.

Recently, Visa revealed that cryptocurrency-linked card usage hit $2.5 billion in its first fiscal quarter of 2022. The payments company has shown a significant effort to support widespread digital currency adoption. That figure is 70% of Visa’s crypto volume for the entire fiscal year 2021, which means that the adoption of crypto-backed cards is increasing significantly.