Despite being one of the largest, fastest growing global sectors, the payments industry still largely runs on outdated, 50 year old bank-tethered infrastructure. Modern payment fintechs and card networks like Stripe, Mastercard and Visa have made the end user experience extremely convenient for consumers and merchants. However, the legacy cost of involving up to six intermediaries (e.g., card networks, issuers, processors, POS systems, aggregators, digital wallets) in each transaction persists. Blockchain technology offers a new set of globally-enabled infrastructure rails for payments, built from the ground up.
Blockchains, and the new host of applications that they enable, have the potential to significantly reduce the cost and increase the speed of cross-border payments. This is already occurring at the institutional level, with players like Visa running pilots which enable the settlement of institutional-grade global payments on public blockchains. Adoption is also occurring on the individual level, as products like Binance Pay are being used for peer-to-peer and cross-border transfers faster and more cheaply, as well as spend with their crypto funds directly at merchants with zero gas-fees, dynamic currency conversion and real time settlement.
The payments industry is massive, meaning adoption of revolutionary technology such as blockchains is likely to be slow and cautious. This gives the blockchain industry itself the necessary time to grow out of its adolescence, and build the necessary tools and infrastructure to sort out its own growing pains such as chain scalability and liveliness, poor UI/UX, and regulatory uncertainty.
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