Solana Labs Debuts New Crypto Payments Infrastructure Solana Pay

Solana Labs, a technology company working to help advance the Solana ecosystem, has recently announced the launch of a new payment infrastructure designed to allow merchants to accept crypto payments directly.

In an official blog post on Tuesday, the company revealed that the protocol, dubbed Solana Pay, is a decentralized, open, and truly peer-to-peer payment infrastructure that will facilitate the settlement of crypto payments without intermediaries.

Using Solana Pay, merchants can quickly and easily accept several cryptocurrencies including SOL, USDC, and other tokens. The transactions will be completed at sub-second speed with little charge.

Speaking at the launch of the new protocol, Solana Lab’s head of payments, Sheraz Shere said,

“Merchants have long sought an opportunity to leverage deep engagement with their customers, but multiple intermediaries involved in e-commerce or brick-and-mortar transactions make that difficult. The next phase of development of the protocol will enable merchants to send digital assets back to the consumers which will open up new capabilities in commerce not possible before.”

Solana Pay was developed in partnership with the stablecoin issuer, Circle, payment solutions provider, Checkout.com, payment processing company, Citicon, in addition to digital wallet integrations from Phantom, Slope, and FTX.

The protocol is also seeking to provide the integration of some emerging digital asset classes such as NFTs, allowing merchants to fully benefit from the advantages of on-chain decentralized payments.

Speaking on the collaboration, Circle’s CEO Jeremy Allaire said,

“Circle is thrilled to be working with Solana to simplify and adapt USDC payments for consumer-facing businesses. The launch of Solana Pay is a critical step toward broadening access and usage for merchants and customers who want a faster, more efficient payment option for everyday commerce.”

Despite several recurring network outages within the past few months, the blockchain network has been witnessing a renewed surge in the number of daily transactions on Solana-based dApps.

Just a few days ago, the Solana-based Pyth Oracle network recorded over $37 million daily transactions.