The end game for Bank Cards

When I started to implement my original design for Zillerium, the sheer scale of payment problems hit me. I had no idea that in almost all of Africa most people use Cash on Delivery (COD) for e-commerce. As I researched this more with a view to implementing an MVP, I realised that without a payment protection system for cryptocurrencies nothing in e-commerce could be done at a significant level for cryptocurrency based sales.

That realisation led to my ZIPS design and the business footing analysis for ZIPS soon revealed that the UK is mainly a cash economy for payments too — it is just hidden with debit cards. But cash and debit card payments today account for 80% of all payments.

Taken this information together, it is apparent that people are paying with cash or something that is equivalent to cash (debit card) mostly. Once that information is clear, it is a very short step to understand that cryptocurrency payments — if protected — offer considerable advantages over debit cards and cash.

The most obvious of these is that crypto payments are accessible to anyone with a mobile phone and an Internet connection. There is no credit check. Today 25% of people in the UK have bad or subprime credit.

Another advantage is that crypto payments allow more tokenised transactions and hence a token specific to a market (such as energy) could be used. This provides potentially a lot of benefits in terms of the buyer and seller actually earning money from using certain tokens.

Crypto payments also open up a world of e-commerce which is currently denied to billions of people who depend on making cash payments. Even in the UK, the scope of crypto payments is considerable. The EU has 25 million people who have no bank account, for example, and they are a target market for crypto payments.

People who have bank accounts could see lower fees, more accountability and greater flexibility with crypto payments.

Our solution to payment protection is called ZIPS and shown as zillerium.com.