Starting on March 1st Netopia will enable eGold to fiat payments for more than 30,000 merchants. „This important first step towards establishing a network of value, that enables near-instant and inexpensive swaps between currencies, goods, and services, is a critical milestone for the next wave of global economic innovation,” Elrond said in a blog post.
“Enabling eGold payments at internet-scale is critical for the digitization of all value and its fluidity between traditional services and the new internet economy. Plugging into Netopia is the first step towards establishing a global payments infrastructure powered by the Elrond Network.” said Beniamin Mincu, Elrond CEO.
Netopia was founded in 2003 to use technology for expanding the payments landscape beyond traditional services. It has since grown beyond just card payments, to integrate web, SMS, and mobile payments. It notably added Bitcoin payments as an option in 2014, followed by Ethereum.
The company’s 30,000+ customer base includes companies such as Carrefour, Selgros, Tarom, and many others, all of which will be able to accept EGLD payments from their customers.
The first stage of the integration process will target web commerce. Online merchants will be able to generate a payment request in a fiat currency, that customers can then pay in the corresponding amount of eGold. The Netopia system will acknowledge that the transaction did happen, and then settle the amount in fiat, in the merchant’s account.
Deeper integrations with Netopia will in the future open additional exciting opportunities for payments in eGold and other Elrond assets.
“NETOPIA has been a constant promoter of innovative technology, having enabled cryptocurrency payments for our customers as early as 2015. Integrating eGold is a natural way forward that enables us to stay at the bleeding edge of payments innovations and prepares us for a decentralized future.” said Antonio Eram, NETOPIA Payments CEO.
The integration is a major milestone for the Elrond ecosystem, as it gives eGold holders direct access to goods and services, avoiding the lost time and fees associated with the regular on/off-ramp processes usually involved.
Elrond is the internet-scale blockchain, designed from scratch to bring a 1000-fold cumulative improvement in throughput and execution speed. To achieve this, Elrond introduces two key innovations: a novel Adaptive State Sharding mechanism, and a Secure Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithm, enabling linear scalability with a fast, efficient, and secure consensus mechanism.
Thus, Elrond can process upwards of 15,000 transactions per second (TPS), with 6-second latency, and negligible cost, attempting to become the backbone of a permissionless, borderless, globally accessible internet economy.
Banking 4.0 – „how was the experience for you”
„So many people are coming here to Bucharest, people that I see and interact on linkedin and now I get the change to meet them in person. It was like being to the Football World Cup but this was the World Cup on linkedin in payments and open banking.”
Many more interesting quotes in the video below:
