By
Bhushan Akolkar
August 29th, 2022
A digital currency developed by The Royal Canadian Mint was purchased by nanoPay, a loyalty and payment platform based in Toronto, and is going to come back to the market.
On Tuesday it was announced that Loyalty Pays Holdings Corporation, a subsidiary of nanoPay, purchased MintChip for an unknown amount. MintChip first appeared in 2012 as a digital representation of the Canadian dollar. In 2014, the project MintChip was halted and put up for sale.
Laurence Cook, CEO of nanoPay, says that NanoPay won the right to purchase MintChip after a competitive process that included10 different parties involved in the first round. Finally, after three rounds of competing bids, the Mint accepted nanoPay’s offer. So far, Mr Cook considers MintChip to be a great alternative to Bitcoin.
“Although the transactions are peer-to-peer, as they would be in Bitcoin, they are much lighter and much faster,” he notes. “The heritage of Bitcoin is countercultural and anti-central bank, and the history of this is regulator friendly.”
ITBusiness reads that nanoPay is going to keep using MintChip to represent fiat currencies. Plus, the technology could also be used to represent loyalty points such as Air Miles. Actually, MintChip uses secure asset stores, which are used to hold a value that is linked to an originator. Originators must have an equivalent amount of money stored in an asset manager in order to create the digital currency, says Mr Cook.
In addition, nanoPay CEO says that the products will be offered as standalone despite the fact that nanoPay’s loyalty offering and MintChip are seen as complementary by the company.
The advantages for businesses are the prospect of eliminating all the overhead related to dealing with cash. Expenses on handling cash, transporting it to banks, paying service fees, and otherwise could be reduced. Even theft of cash would be prevented by the digital solution, reports ITBusiness.
“Our mandate is to replace cash,” says Laurence Cook. “The cost of doing a MintChip transaction is going to be a fixed price and much lower fixed price.”
Commenting on the cost aspect of using MintPay Cook stresses: “We will ensure that we are always the cheapest and easiest way to pay for anything. And, we can do this because the marginal cost of a transaction is nearly zero.” Retail fixed fees will be less than half the nearest alternative and online payments could be as low as 1/100c for a 1c transaction, reads Forbes.
In fact, even though nanoPay has not officially announced how the company is going to use the concept, it’s probable that the project can become a mobile product in the nearest future.
