A few thoughts on why we are building Pluspare, a blockchain based micropayment system for €0.01 to €0.99 transactions.
Since the late 90s, people increasingly purchase goods and services over the Internet. What is interesting to observe is that the way transactions are being processed hasn’t changed much.
Sometimes, I think of how simple life was back in primary school. Days mainly consisted of learning and playing, before heading back home to have some good time with family. Kids like me were far from knowing how complicated life can be. Retrospectively, this sweet spot can be of great help to demonstrate what we aim at achieving, here at Pluspare.
Among many other things, one great moment of happiness as a kid was when I’d bike down to the next village to buy candies. My mother would kindly give me a handful of cents and I would jump straight on my bike to get there as fast as I could. She’d give me about 10 French francs, equivalent of €1.5.
The bakery offered a vast selection of candies with different tastes and colours, each ranging from €0.05 to €0.10. Without even knowing it, this pricing made me carefully think over which buying decision was best.
I would often buy more of the cheapest ones so that my pleasure would last longer, introducing myself to the concept of utility, a basic concept in economics.
As I grew up, I started to play “guess the price” with literally everything that surrounded me. Not because I had a particular interest in money itself, but because I started to realize that (nearly) everything had a price. This reality was hard to admit but it felt entertaining through my young eyes. From the natural water one drinks to the air one breathes, financial markets have managed to put a price on everything. Since then, time went on and Internet’s been widely accepted as a safe place to make a purchase. From a house to a bunch of keys, everything can be found and bought online. Reflecting on my youth experience, what surprises me though is the lack of products for sell below one euro. How come does the Internet does not offer its own candies?
In 2016, I was interning with a leading Payment Service Provider in the industry and consequently gained interest in the field of online payments. When someone makes a card payment online, what happens behind the screen is complicated. Many parties are involved and each one of them gets a piece of the pie via transaction fees. Above is a simplistic diagram of the process. The money you pay, as a user, is never the amount of money the merchant actually receives. PSPs are very useful because they connect all these parties together and make it possible for online merchants to accept different payment means all at once, with one integration.
In a survey I conducted in February 2017, 82.1% of the respondents declared that they never paid less than €0.99 online. Note that a large portion of the 17.9% who answered “Yes” did so because they were using an online wallet.
While one might ask what type of goods can be sold below €0.99, the answer is simple: anything. From text to images and videos, all the content that is being created every minute on the Internet can be allocated a price. If there is next to no goods for sell in cents, it isn’t because there is nothing to sell, but it’s because the underlying infrastructure is neither suitable nor made for this use case.
If a payment system was designed to process low value transaction ranging from €0.01 to €0.99 and other major currencies, content creators could fairly earn money for their contribution. Users could avoid paying for expensive subscription plans and experience a pay-per-click approach, within which premium content would be at their fingertips, in exchange for a few cents. While the payment system depicted in this post makes it impossible, it is now possible thanks to blockchain.
Pluspare is dedicated to develop to its full potential the concept of a standardized, easy-to-use, blockchain based micropayment system. People deserve to have all possible payment options at hand and businesses have the right to monetize themselves directly through their customers’ engagement rather than advertising and subscription plans.
Join us in this venture by subscribing to our mailing list and get more details about our project on pluspare.com.
Written by Clément Bihorel, cofounder and CEO at Pluspare.
