THE EVOLUTION of PAYMENTS
01/02/21
What would this article be without a discussion around the birth of payments? Now I’m not going back to the 17th century, even though this was the period banknotes were introduced. I will, for the love of all things payment related, set the stage for groundbreaking technology. With hard-to-remember payment addresses creating a poor user experience, financial institutions finally realized these accounts were causing confusion, errors, and loss of funds.
This represents a major barrier to the adoption of blockchain and other payment technologies. Enter PayString, a human-readable payment address standard for all payment rails and currencies. The PayString protocol is a simple request/response application-layer protocol built on top of the existing standards HTTP and DNS. In its most basic form, it provides a mapping between human-readable addresses and their corresponding payment addresses( In layman’s terms, the ability to send money, how we send information.). We’ll get more in-depth later in this column, but first, the scenario that we all at one point, experience.
Have you ever went out with a friend( I know you have, Lol!!) the bill comes, and it’s business as usual. You and your friend do this every week(usually with cash), but today neither of you have any. His money transmitting service company isn’t compatible with yours which forces him to foot the bill, talk about embarrassing! Far too many of us have seen this movie before, and PayString stands to simplify the payments process globally.
“When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. - Nikola Tesla
WALLED GARDENS
Walled Garden ( coined by Tele-Communications Inc. Founder John Malone) or closed platforms is a saying where a software ecosystem, wherein the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applicants or content. This is in contrast to an open platform, wherein consumers generally have unrestricted access to applications and content. A perfect example of a “walled garden” would be Apple before doubling down on open-source in 2014 launching SWIFT a general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language. You certainly could call/text an Apple phone from a different provider, you just couldn’t use the headphones you got for your birthday, unless you bought Apple’s adapter(still currently the process). Those open-source apps/games that you found on your Android OS, fuhgeddaboudit( Brooklyn accent) most of your favs were incompatible.
The seventy-year progression of this phenomenon is deeply engraved in today’s global financial system, with this bank not trusting that bank, ultimately it’s the consumer who is effected the most. Global macroeconomic trends have resulted in massive changes in the digital asset management industry and broadly in the capital markets. Both market participants and regulators are operating within a new and quickly evolving landscape, and it will take ecosystems that are interoperable to right the ship. One initiative making noise is The Open Payments Coalition, which is set to embark on a journey to alleviate the stress left on consumers’ shoulders by the old financial system.
THE FUTURE of PAYMENTS
On June 18, 2020, Ripple, and over 40 other leaders from nonprofit, technology, and finance collaborated to launch PayID, which later rebranded to PayString. The Open Payments Coalition became the pioneers of a movement long-awaited, with today’s technologies it’s simply unacceptable that we’re not sending payments like we send information.
PayString protocol is built on existing web standards and infrastructure. The belief is that new tools or infrastructure, particularly those involving a blockchain integration, significantly increase overhead. PayString was designed to break the barriers to adoption keeping these obstacles minimal by building on proven tools and infrastructure. Each institution can participate in the network by deploying or using a single web service. No node management, no consensus; just pure utility.
Your human-readable address would look like an email address with a dollar symbol instead of the “at”(@) symbol.
Just to slow down, and understand the magnitude of PayString, which gives users the ability to send/receive payments from any digital asset address, bank account(checking/savings), and in the future NFT. First things first. Focus on a payments infrastructure that for 70+ years dedicated itself to SWIFT for a majority of cross-border remittances.
PayString is a revolutionary technology that will change the way we send payments for years to come, but the mass adoption of this groundbreaking protocol may take a while for retail consumers to adapt. The days of silo dominant ecosystems have come to an end, literally speaking, the ball is in our court.
My favorite app right now is the PayMe+ release 1.0.4, although there are only 1000+ downloads at the time of this article I firmly believe interoperability is within our reach. Right now, the crypto addresses I’ve stored are BTC, ETH, XRP, BCH, and EOS just to name the majority of my holdings. I can accept Zelle, Venmo, PayPal, and CashApp. This all was to give you the scope of PayString, with the confidence that after reading this article and the links provided to you about the PayString protocol, you will be just as excited as I am about the future of payments.
- Disclaimer - The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cryptowriter or Voice.
???????????????? Voice up, Share & Comment!????????????????
Thank you for reading & supporting my work.
—Octavio Nares
This post is published for Cryptowriter in association with Voice.
If you enjoyed this content, feel free to use our ??exclusive Voice sign-up page?? to skip the queue and gain full access to our Cryptowriter community.
Follow Me
?? Twitter - Publish0x
Follow Our Socials
?? Twitter - Telegram - Instagram
