By
Steve Muchoki
April 19th, 2024
Micropayments startup SatoshiPay has partnered with Europe’s largest digital publishing house, Axel Springer SE, to process blockchain payments for its content globally.
The U.K.-based startup announced Thursday that consumers of the Berlin-headquartered firm’s content can pay using SatoshiPay’s wallet, which is built based on Stellar blockchain technology. Axel Springer owns titles including Business Insider, Die Welt and Rolling Stone (German edition). It has 15,000 employees and made revenue of €3.5 billion in 2017a healthy 60 percent of which was generated from digital media.
SatoshiPay said that its wallet will be integrated into Axel Springer’s online products and will work without any intermediaries, so payments will be directly credited to the publisher’s account from its content consumers.
As part of the project, SatoshiPay’s payment solution is to be integrated into Axel Springer products in order to gain experience in user acceptance and generate initial revenues.
Dr Valentin Schöndienst, Senior Vice President New Business, Axel Springer SE stated:
“Blockchain payments can significantly reduce transaction costs and thus enable new monetization systems for content. SatoshiPay offers a turnkey solution that allows us to instantly use blockchain technology and offer it to our customers”.
Meinhard Benn, Founder and CEO of SatoshiPay said:
“We are excited to work with Axel Springer, who recognise the immense potential of blockchain technology. As one of the few companies with a market-ready blockchain payment solution, we are focused on bringing this technology from laboratories into the mainstream.
This has been SatoshiPay’s mission since its foundation in 2014, and a partner with the tremendous reach of Axel Springer gives us the opportunity to deliver on this promise. We would also like to thank the Stellar Development Foundation, which supports this cooperation with a seven figure partnership grant.”
Do remember that in July of last year, SatoshiPay said it planned to list on AIM, a sub-market of the London Stock Exchange, when London-based crypto investor Daniel Masters invested €5,66,000 (or $6,47,829) in its pre-IPO funding.
The micropayments partnership will embed SatoshiPay’s payment service into Axel Springer products and is expected to go live in spring this year. Payments are made in Stellar Lumens which users can buy with fiat currency in the SatoshiPay wallet. To support the Stellar network, SatoshiPay launched three of its own Stellar full nodes on January 9.
The new micropayments will be made available in the SatoshiPay payment services, which will be integrated by the Spring when it goes live. All payments will be made in Stellar Lumens, and SatoshiPay has already setup three full nodes with Stellar earlier this month in preparation.
Though this is the first major partnership in the collaborative sense for cryptocurrency and SatoshiPay, the company has already held media partnerships, like with City A.M. and The Register.
By making it possible to use micropayments, consumers may feel more likely to pay a nominal fee to view content, rather than a substantial subscription price for a single article that interests them. However, that theory is based on the assumption that the user finds something they want to read at all.
Just for reminder, in May last year, SatoshiPay has announced an establishment of their first official partnership with a large news web portal. Now UK’s major tech news outlet called The Register will utilize SatoshiPay for selling its digital content. To mark such a great event, SatoshiPay will award their users with 1,000,000 Stellar lumens (XLM tokens ) as free credit.
The collaboration with the cryptocurrency payments platform enabled The Register to support a cryptocurrency micropayment option for some content presented on the website. Users now have a chance to purchase SatoshiPay credits in the form of Stellar Lumens (XLM) via The Register’s platform. These credits can be utilized for buying e-books. Moreover, they can be used for payments on other websites that SatoshiPay.