Technology drives change: How blockchain made me take on the online payment space
Micropayments are not a new concept – they’ve been tried before, but due to high transaction costs and poor usability, previous attempts to achieve mainstream adoption have been unsuccessful. For example, under the current banking infrastructure, payment service providers are charging base fees of 10-30p per transaction plus a percentage, making it very difficult to maintain a viable micropayment business model.
This all changed with the emergence of blockchain technology. Having worked as a coder for most of my life and been involved with several web-related start-ups and organisations, I discovered Bitcoin in 2011 and became an early player in the blockchain revolution. I quickly realised its potential to enable the execution of cheap and fast global transactions and established SatoshiPay in 2014. The team then embarked on a journey to build a system using distributed ledger technology, which has almost no transaction costs – $1 allows you to make 500,000 transactions.
SatoshiPay’s technology is already disrupting the payment landscape in the online publishing world. Its benefits to readers include enabling access to any website with a single digital wallet and charging as little as 1p per article, video, song etc without having to commit to a subscription bundle. Online publishers also benefit from the system, creating several new revenue streams including a simple ‘pay for content’ offering or ad-free access. The latter is a sweet spot given the changing media landscape, which has seen most of the advertising revenues moved online, so naturally the number of ads displayed to the reader has increased exponentially. Now users can easily and cheaply remove this often-unwelcome distraction by paying a small fee and only pay for the content they want to consume.
I truly believe that our timing and positioning in the publishing market is spot on. But the opportunities for SatoshiPay stretch far beyond this sector; the same technology can be applied to mobile apps, e-sports, live streams or even the Internet of Things. I’m excited to see where we will go next!