Xfers, a Singapore-based payment processing gateway offering credit card processing and Internet banking transfers, will leverage Zilliqa’s smart contract functionalities to bring “new innovations” to its Xfers’ suite of enterprise solutions, which include support for payments, disbursements, regulatory compliance and a built-in digital wallet.
Using blockchain technology, the company said it hopes to drive greater efficiencies in cost, transparency, and security.
Payment company Xfers has partnered with blockchain startup Zilliqa to explore the use of blockchain and smart contracts to bring greater speed, efficiency and transparency to payment solutions for enterprises, the company said on Tuesday.
“Our vision at Xfers has always been to create the trusted, digital financial ecosystem in Southeast Asia”, said Tianwei Liu, CEO and co-founder of Xfers.
“With a population of over 600 million, the Southeast Asian market remains predominantly unbanked with over 70% of citizens without access to basic financial services.
By partnering with Zilliqa, we hope to provide a cutting-edge solution that grants equal opportunities and cost-saving solutions for digital businesses looking to set-up in the region.”
Founded in 2014, Xfers provides an online platform that enables users to collect payments and make payouts automatically. It enables sellers to collect online payments, developers to integrate embedded checkout and automate their payouts, and businesses to disburse payouts to their vendors and contractors instantly through dashboards. The company processed over US$260 million across Singapore and Indonesia in 2018.
Xfers is a graduate of Y Combinator’s summer 2015 class and counts amongst its backers Challenger, Quest Ventures, 500 Startups, Golden Gate Ventures, as well as angel investors Eduardo Saverin.
The company boasts a portfolio of clients in the fintech space that includes the likes of Tunaikita and Julo, two Southeast Asian peer-to-peer lending platforms, and Payfazz, an agent-based financial platform in Indonesia.
Blockchain startup Zilliqa was founded in 2016 by the computing faculty and research team of the National University of Singapore (NUS). The startup has developed a high-throughput public blockchain platform designed to scale to thousands of transactions per seconds.
The core feature that makes Zilliqa scalable is sharding, a database partitioning technique that divides the network into several smaller component networks capable of processing transactions in parallel.
Zilliqa aims to rival payment networks Visa and MasterCard, and claims that with a network size of 10,000 nodes, it would be able to match their average transaction rate. To date, the network has been able to process 2,828 transactions per second.
Pay Crypto to Those Removing CO2 From Atmosphere, German Party Says
Germany’s Free Democratic Party (FDP) wants to pay cryptocurrency to anyone who removes carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
Get paid to fight climate change
According to a report by local news organization Welt on Sept. 2, the FDP recognizes that it is no longer enough to only focus on putting less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It said that, if the world wants to slow down global warming, it will also need to retrieve greenhouse gases that have already been emitted.
The party in Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, has proposed creating a new digital currency called Arbil, along with the motto: «Put CO2 on the digital chain.”
Marco Buschmann, the first parliamentary director of the FDP parliamentary group, said the project sounds technically complex at first, but is actually quite simple. He explained:
«Anyone who withdraws CO2 from the atmosphere will be paid for it. In this way, we want to reward active climate protection and promote inventiveness and innovation.»
Arbil could be valued at about $30
Arbil will receive its value through a guarantee to exchange Arbil coins for emission certificates. One Arbil coin would correspond to the certificate value for one ton of carbon dioxide, which is currently valued at approximately $30. Frank Sitta, deputy group chairman of the FDP, said:
«We want to give CO2 a price worldwide. With our blockchain concept, the national emissions trading systems can be elegantly combined.”
When read backwards, Arbil – which is based on “arbor”, the Latin word for tree – spells Libra, the name of Facebook’s cryptocurrency.
Crypto-incentivized climate action
In May, the United Nations signed a memorandum of understanding with nonprofit organization W Foundation to promote global climate action projects, including compensating those who take climate action with cryptocurrencies.
