On Tuesday, BitPay, the world’s biggest blockchain payments provider, declared the arrival of stablecoin payments for merchants and consumers worldwide. Circle’s USD Coin (USDC), the Gemini Dollar (GUSD), and Paxos Standard Token (PAX) are the three accepted volatility-free stablecoins through which the company sustains payment acceptance and settlement.
In the past few years, owing to the integration of cryptocurrency’s adeptness with the added advantage of being linked to the stability of the U.S. dollar, GUSD, USDC, and PAX have grown both in size and application. 1 PAX’s value would be $1.00 USD. The same goes for 1 GUSD or 1 USDC. These can be entirely redeemed for $1.00 USD from their respective platforms, which conform to US and NYC financial regulations.
What are Stablecoins?
Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies developed to reduce the volatility of the cost of the coin. BitPay backs ERC-20 which is a smart contract adhering to the ERC-20 standard.
A decentralized network checks and documents stablecoin transactions on an inflexible public ledger, maintaining transparency and terminating traditional payment fraud identified with credit cards.
BitPay’s CEO, and co-founder Stephen Pair, while talking about the launch, expressed that transactions conducted with stablecoins will facilitate new avenues for businesses worldwide. Businesses seeking security and competence of blockchain payments will be benefitted from this as it will ensure low cost, effortless cross-border wire transfers, wherein international customers can send and receive payments using “fast, efficient, and volatility free dollar-pegged stablecoins.” Since their value is pinned to fiat currency, volatility related to cryptocurrency gets averted.
He went on to elaborate that this will prove beneficial since it will take away consumers’ anxiety about price variation, and assure inexpensive, rapid, fraud-resistant settlements to the merchants at the same time.
It is reported that PAX will facilitate quicker transactions on a daily basis and ensure that retailers receive payments instantly.
Walter Hessert, Corporate Strategy Lead at Paxos, applauded the launch saying that making use of PAX for transactions, settlements, is an integral step as it would enable customers to spend their PAX with more than 30,000 BitPay merchants worldwide.
BitPay is certainly going to carry forward their custom of innovation which it had founded almost 10 years back, with this inclusion of stablecoin payments globally that would be adjunct to a set of products (consisting of BitPay Wallet and BitPay Prepaid Visa Card, to name a few).
BitPay Brief:
BitPay, established in 2011 with the objective of eradicating transaction frauds, decrease the cost of payment processing and empower borderless payments in cryptocurrency, spearheaded blockchain payment processing. Offering consumers a total digital asset management solution, BitPay has proved to be quite a revolutionizer since then. It has raised around $70 million so far from top investment firms such as Founders Fund, Index Ventures, Virgin Group, and Aquiline Technology Growth.