SatoshiPay launches Stellar integration and six new partnerships
After months of hard work we are glad to announce that we are live with a massively updated product. We switched from Bitcoin to Stellar, partnered with TEMPO for fiat payouts, won IBTimes and other content partners, and… finally accept credit cards through TransactWorld!
Stellar for the win
Completed only a month after announcing our partnership with Stellar.org, our integration with the Stellar network is now live. You can try it out at any of our content partners’ websites – for example Naftali Music or BTC Echo. Simply open our widget (it’s now blue by the way) in the bottom right of the page, select “Top Up” and add credit using PayPal or directly from your Stellar wallet. Your lumens will arrive to your browser within seconds and you can pay for content straight away.
In the past we used payment channels, which are simple smart contracts that lock funds for a period of time to save transaction fees and gain speed. Because of Stellar’s unique properties of negligible transaction fees of €0.000001 and settlement times of 5s in average, we no longer need payment channels and each payment arrives at the publisher’s wallet straight away – true peer-to-peer payments.
We also found a way to emulate unconfirmed transactions on Stellar, which allows for content to be loaded milliseconds after clicking “Pay” instead of 5 seconds later when the payment is confirmed by the network. This is a crucial gain of speed in user experience and we plan to submit our approach as a Stellar protocol improvement.
WordPress plugin update
Our WordPress plugin is an easy way for publishers to try out our technology, and it represents the reference implementation for our Goods API. Due to the switch to Stellar, a couple of things changed in our API, so we have updated our plugin and v0.9 is now available for download at WordPress. Make sure to upgrade to be able to set content prices in lumen. The update will also convert existing satoshi prices into lumen prices.
TEMPO Money Transfer as Euro gateway
Most of our future publishers won’t know or fully understand cryptocurrencies, and they shouldn’t have to. This is why we partnered with TEMPO, a French money transfer company with a banking license, to allow publishers to be paid out via bank transfer.
TEMPO also issues a Euro token called EURT on the Stellar network. It allows to transfer asset tokens that will always be pegged to the Euro, and not fluctuate due to cryptocurrency exchange rates. We are currently exploring how we can use EURT within SatoshiPay.
We partnered IBTimes (55m visitors/month), two YouTube creators Steinwallen (20k followers, 500k monthly views) and DrProof (50k followers, 500k monthly views), and the musicians Naftali (local Berlin artist) and David Kuckhermann (percussionist, also for Dead Can Dance). We will launch pilots with these partners shortly, and roll out more pilot partnerships and production integrations throughout 2018.
We already have a few IBTimes articles available for purchase via SatoshiPay.
We are happy to announce that starting 12 December 2017 we will be able to accept credit card payments, via the payment service provider TransactWorld UK. This means consumers from around the world can top up their SatoshiPay using payment methods they are very familiar with, and which they trust: Visa and Mastercard. This is big news, and we expect to significantly expand our user base by this.
Getting all our ducks in a row took quite an effort, and it wouldn’t have been possible without our great team and network of partners! Thanks to Alan, Alex, André, Andy, Anna, Barry, Christina, Christopher, Erasmus, Levin and Torsten, as well as our investors Jim Mellon, Blue Star Capital, Digital Finance Group and Axel Springer Plug and Play, our office space TechCode, the launch party venue Prachtwerk, and of course all of the partners in this announcement that helped us to keep the tight schedule for this launch.
We will announce updates on the partnerships above as they progress, so stay tuned and follow us on Twitter @SatoshiPay!
Meinhard Benn, CEO at SatoshiPay
