Crypto For Merchants today announced a new safe, stable cryptocurrency point of sale payment ecosystem for merchants in the United States. With the app, called Dappos, which is hosted on the CryptoForMerchants website, merchants can now accept cryptocurrency payments from their customers at point of sale, convert those payments to dollars and transfer them to their bank accounts. No transaction fees are charged during the process, nor are there any costs or risk of devaluation. Customers pay a small network fee of a few cents when they send their payment to the network. This small fee is only there to reward cryptocurrency miners for performing the cryptographic calculations required to confirm the transaction.
“This is a game-changer” said Gerald Zuckerwar, a developer and promoter of this technology. “In the fall of last year the new USDC (US Dollar Coin) cryptocurrency stablecoin was launched and in conjunction with that we are now making the world’s first compatible POS app available for free on our secure global content delivery network.” Other cryptocurrencies did not see much merchant adoption because of their price volatility which made them unsuitable for use in commerce. “USDC has eliminated that risk” said Zuckerwar.
USDC is a new Ethereum platform cryptocurrency created by Circle and Coinbase, the founding members of the CENTRE Consortium. USDC is “issued by regulated and licensed financial institutions that maintain full reserves of the equivalent fiat currency.” Customers can purchase USDC 1:1 with fiat dollars and merchants can sell those same USDC 1:1 for fiat dollars with no loss of value and no fees via their Coinbase acccount. They can then transfer those fiat funds to their PayPal account or commercial bank account via ACH again at no cost. The issuer of USDC earns interest on the fiat dollars while in reserve which is why they can offer this service without fees.
The open source software for the technology was developed by Luca Ban in Tokyo because “there was no POS app for Ethereum to our knowledge, so we made one.” It is a web-based app that works on any computer, tablet or smartphone browser with an internet connection. Merchants “ring up” the transaction on the app which then displays a QR code that customers scan with their digital wallet. After the customer sends their payment Dappos continuously monitors the blockchain until a confirmation is received. The basic app is free for merchants to use although a more feature-rich subscription version with customer support and an uptime guarantee will be offered in the future. “We’re going to wait and let merchants tell us what features they would like to see” said Zuckerwar.
To get started merchants can download a free Merchant Guide which will provide them with a basic understanding of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. It then walks them step by step through the setup and usage of the Dappos app. Zuckerwar suggests that merchants offer their customers an incentive to adopt the technology. Coinbase currently offers new users $10 in free Bitcoin when they sign up and purchase $100 worth of cryptocurrency. If they use a referral code the merchant also receives $10 in Bitcoin. They could offer that back to the customer as a credit which results in a total $20 incentive to the customer.
“While today transaction times take about 3-1/2 minutes to confirm, developers are hard at work to bring next generation scaling technologies to the Ethereum platform” said Zuckerwar. “I think we’ll see that roll out in 2020 just in time for increasing cryptocurrency adoption.” The 3-1/2 minutes can be reduced to about 1 minute if the customer offers a higher network fee to the miners when they transmit their funds. Some digital wallets such as Trust Wallet have this functionality and Coinbase has plans to add it to theirs. “Yes, it’s a bit slow today but for merchants that are sick and tired of credit card companies skimming huge fees it’s here – now – and it works” said Zuckerwar.
