By
Teuta Franjkovic
February 2nd, 2019
SatoshiPay launches a beta version of its micropayments system.
SatoshiPay, a company that processes nanopayment transactions in the form of Bitcoins, has recently released a beta version of its micropayments system that allows users to pay very small amounts of Bitcoin for content that they consider as tip-worthy. The payments are administered using blockchain technology and can be for amounts of 0.01 Euro or less.
The concept of nanopayments is not entirely brand-new in the realm of Bitcoin or other currencies, however, the process has been streamlined and made much easier by SatoshiPay.
“Nanopayments can be fractions of a cent. They are instantly settled and can be executed at high frequency. Imagine a couple of payments per second by a single user,” explained the company’s Meinhard Benn Founder and CEO.
From a content customer’s standpoint, there are just a few steps to charge up SatoshiPay account with Bitcoin and start tipping wherever there are content providers using the beta version of the company’s WordPress plugin. By default, a customer can charge his/her account with as little as 50,000 Satoshi (0.16 Euro) to 5,000,000 Satoshi (6.93 Euro).
“This enables completely new ways of monetizing web content and digital goods in general. In an increasingly digital society, nanopayments allow for new business models that existing payment technology cannot facilitate due to its fee structure and trust models,” said Benn, talking about the potential use-cases for the company’s product.
On the content publisher’s end, SatoshiPay offers a potential solution for the costly subject of adblocking. An option is given to the publisher to prompt for a payment if a user has an ad blocker or simply to take no action:
“Users send a clear message by installing an ad blocker: They don’t want to see ads on websites. Locking them out of your site as a response is sending the wrong signal. Charge them a few cents or pennies and they will understand. We want to help transform users from involuntarily being a website’s product to being its consenting customer. That’s why we built this product.”
The WordPress plugin is totally free and is a strong play on an already massive market of blog and website owners who use the free platform. WordPress’ extremely user-friendly plugin eco-system allows for a very low-barrier to entry for users to give SatoshiPay a run on their site.
In future the company hopes to offer other funding options for its users to top-up their accounts with bank transfers and debit cards. One additional feature that could help speed adoption and community growth is a directory of content publishers who use SatoshiPay as a sort of content-discovery option for readers looking to find new content and also support content producers the way they feel most comfortable.
