In an increasingly cashless society where businesses must contend with the growing use of debit cards, credit cards, and digital payment alternatives, merchants find themselves bearing high costs to do business. Although they facilitate greater transactional ease, fees from payment processors eat away at merchant margins. At times, the processors charge upwards of double-digit rates for the privilege.
However, in an era where these fees can mean the difference between profitability and bankruptcy, especially for small businesses, blockchain technology’s early intention of removing intermediaries from the equation has never been more prescient. Now, internet-scale blockchain Elrond has found itself at the center of this changing value proposition as it transforms the cost of doing business into a newfound revenue play.
Disrupting Payment Processing as a Cost Center
Elrond has successfully completed the acquisition of leading cryptocurrency payment processor Utrust for an undisclosed sum, launching the highly-scalable secure proof-of-stake blockchain network into the payments arena. Through this purchase, Elrond will be advancing a natively digital approach to processing payments. It will significantly accelerate payment settlement to near-instantaneous globally, while dramatically reducing the associated processing costs.
By integrating Utrust within the ecosystem, Elrond can support the existing buyer protections and valuable payment services for merchants. For example, it can support Elrond’s crypto-to-cash settlement on top of a blockchain infrastructure, capable of scaling to 15,000 transactions per second in a low-latency manner.
More importantly, decentralized finance (DeFi) will also play a role in Elrond’s two-pronged payments approach. To this end, Elrond is developing a new product lineup called “Merchant Yield,” which aims to help merchants generate yields from their business transactions by taking a DeFi-first payment processing approach. The product effectively converts payments from a cost-center to a paradigm wherein merchants generate returns by processing customer payments.
The advantage of incorporating blockchain within the payment processing sphere is security and affordability, with Elrond aiming to reduce processing fees to a fraction of their existing levels. Moreover, the coming ongoing transition to Web3 will advance native digital payment mechanisms, helping Elrond capitalize on this growing segment of the blockchain ecosystem.
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