How is life in the FIAT world today?
You decide to go on a holiday and book a stay. Since your holiday is supposed to happen in another part of the country or world, you need to book air tickets as well.
Then when the day of the trip arrives you hail a cab to go to the airport.
All these activities require the transaction of money from the customer to the service provider or an intermediary like a cab aggregator
- Hotel & Travel booking aggregator and
- A whole range of service providers from shops you buy stuff from to grabbing that cup of coffee that you sip while waiting to board your flight.
As of now all these transactions happen with FIAT money that need significant time and efforts to manage.
These payments are processed by payment processing gateways like credit and debit card payment processors, digital fiat money wallets and services of the like.
All such services need a significant fee to set up and process each transaction starting from 2-3.5$ onwards.
Could crypto replace this payment infrastructure?
The answer is both yes and no. The fast transactions of the blockchains makes it possible to process these transactions at a fraction of the speed and cost of the FIAT world transactions.
The only caveat is the volatility associated with crypto.
This volatility may be good for speculators and traders however businesses hate it.
Imagine sitting at a restaurant enjoying food and the bill is $100 and you have $100 worth of crypto in your wallet.
Just as you are about to transfer this $100 to the restaurant to settle the bill the price of crypto crashes by 25% and the crypto you are holding is worth $75 only.
Since this is the only money you have you end up in a difficult situation. Would you have to do the dishes to settle part of the bill?
Stable coins come to the rescue. The payment system can be created using stable coins which can deliver the functionality and efficiency of crypto sans the volatility.
This is exactly the reason why tech and large corporations are taking note and jumping into this cutting edge technology.
In this light of these benefit the leaders of tech such as
Apple
Google
X.com (formerly known as twitter)
Airbnb
Are keenly looking at integrating stable coin payments into their systems.
Once these integrations happen these businesses can reduce the transaction costs.
Enable cross border payments
Crypto has a global reach and with crypto payments integration businesses can service a global client base.
When the big players adopt crypto payment integration the small businesses would follow the path and this could give them the opportunity to lower transaction costs and service a global customer base.
The new chapter for crypto
With a more effective way to do business and transfer value crypto integration is poised for some exciting times ahead.
Hives makes it possible for normal people like you and me to come onboard, learn crypto, earn and even invest it by way of being present on a web3 ecosystem of hive and using one of the many frontends to enjoy the benefits of this new way to express, connect, communicate and live a truly digital and decentralized life.
Main image created with AI