28 Jan Africa - Which Digital Currencies Do We Think Are Most Likely To Be Used And Adopted For eCommerce Payment And Online Payments (Part 1)
We are a few years into the development and awareness of digital currencies or crypto currencies, and emerging markets like Africa which has a need, is most likely going to experience a world leading pace of adoption. So as a leading African payment provider, which crypto currencies (or digital currencies) do we think are most likely to be adopted and used by consumers at the checkout? The digital currency market has matured and there are a number of wallets that are now supporting a range of digital currencies which using QR codes could be presented for payment to merchant at the checkout. Here is a list we have compiled of the ones we feel have established themselves and have a level of traction and adoption by merchants. A big thanks to Coinmarketcap for their high level overview of each, to which we have added our own experience, market context and understanding from an online payments and African perspective. To keep it as a short read we have split this article into parts. We have also listed the digital currencies more or less in the order of adoption we feel is most likely based on our research and market experience. 1. Bitcoin We all know Bitcoin (BTC). It’s a consensus network founded in 2009 that enables a new payment system and a completely digital currency. Powered by its users, it is a peer to peer payment network that requires no central authority to operate. Each bitcoin is equal to 100 million Satoshis, making a Satoshi the smallest unit of bitcoin currently recorded on the blockchain (a little like “cents” in the dollar). It allows online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Bitcoin although most widely accepted out of all digital currencies, has proven to be a better store of value than a medium of exchange ie a currency for payment. The most likely way of Bitcoin becoming a widely used payment system is through a second layer solution called Lightning Network. 2. Bitcoin Cash Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is hard fork (a community-activated update to the protocol or code) of Bitcoin that came into being in 2017. The idea was to increase the block size to 8MB, to help the scale the underlying technology of Bitcoin and bring down the cost of transacting to make it more suitable as a digital currency specifically for payments. BCH has a small but very passionate community who are championing and investing in the success of BCH as a currency. 3. Dash Dash (DASH) describes itself as digital cash that aims to offer financial freedom to everyone. Payments are fast, easy, secure, and with near-zero fees. Dash’s aims to provide a fully-decentralized payments solution and become a leader in actual real-world use cases. Users can purchase goods at thousands of merchants and trade it at major exchanges and brokers around the globe. Dash is getting good traction in South America when it comes to a store of value and a method of payment between consumers and merchants, particularly in financially unstable countries and currencies like Argentina. At this stage it is for fun, learning and experimentation that our multinational eCommerce merchants enable crypto acquiring. We are still mostly in traditional "card" and "mobile money" mode but keeping an eye on developments for you. THANK YOU - THE TEAM AT AFRICAN PAYMENT SOLUTIONS Our services include:
