Solana Launches SolanaPay, A New POS That Allows Merchants Accept SOL Payments

Solana Labs, the developer behind the Solana blockchain, announced in a blog post a new point-of-sale (POS) payment product that lets merchants accept crypto payments with near-instant finality and affordable fees called Solana Pay. 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.

Solana Pay is bigger than enabling customers to “pay with crypto.”

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

Shere adds 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.

 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, he said.

The payment solution is being built in partnership with Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, Checkout.com, and payments processing company Citcon. It will have digital wallet integrations from Phantom, FTX, and Slope. Additionally, other payment providers are welcome to integrate Solana Pay on their platforms.

Solana Labs remains confident that the blockchain will overcome network congestion

The Solana blockchain has been facing challenges of network congestion. However, Sheres noted that the new payment solution would not be troubled by this as even at the moment 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.