Solana launches Solana Pay payment service

Solana Labs announced the launch of the payment service Solana Pay on Tuesday (1). According to the organization, the service aims to create a direct channel (P2P) between consumers and partner stores.

With Solana Pay, users will be able to pay services directly with cryptocurrencies operating on the SOL network. At first, the service will allow the sending of stablecoins, such as USD Circle (USDC). In this part, only customers will be able to make payments.

In the next phase, Solana Pay will allow merchants to send cryptocurrencies back to consumers.

To the world of payments

Solana Pay is a major step in SOL’s entry into the competitive payments industry. Currently the sector is dominated by the giants Apple and Google through Apple Pay and Google Pay, respectively. There are also a number of other companies like PayPal, Venmo, Wise, App and Stripe.

Most of these services plan to enter the cryptocurrency market – PayPal, for example, already has plans to create a stablecoin of its own. However, none of them emerged in a fully decentralized way, so SOL aims to fill this gap.

“Merchants have been able to accept cryptocurrencies for years, but acceptance often means settling on unstable currencies, switching from one intermediary to another,” says Sheraz Shere, head of payments at Solana Labs.

In this way, Solana Pay wants to take all the advantages of the cryptoeconomy to companies. With the service, merchants will have access to lower costs, income generation in decentralized finance (DeFi), fraud protection, among others.

Initially, Solana Pay will process payments in USDC, but will also allow other tokens created in the SPL format.

Solana’s performance woes

Based on a series of positive news, the price of SOL appreciated by more than 20% in early February. On Monday (1), the listing of two tokens from its ecosystem on the Coinbase exchange led to gains of more than 19%.

In the last two years, SOL has gained prominence for its huge advances, which have accredited it as one of the main competitors of ETH . However, the network suffered a series of interruptions in its operation in January.

There were two denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in the past month, four of them in just five months. These overloads have slowed down the network and even randomly cancel transactions.