Throughout history, payment innovations have always led to advancements in purchasing goods and services. Payments have evolved over the last few centuries, from banknotes to credit cards to redefining what we pay for and how we pay for things.
A Brief History of Payments
In the Tang Dynasty during the 7th Century, the silk road and trading played a central role in facilitating economic exchange between the East and West. Traders have to travel long distances with their goods for trade. The first banknote-type instrument was invented during this period. Merchants would issue promissory notes in the form of receipts to wholesalers. Using these receipts, they can claim gold or copper anytime from designated collection points. This simple innovation saved merchants the trouble of bringing huge loads of copper and gold for trade over long distances.
Promissory notes later evolved into coins or paper money which would be the primary medium that everyone used for the next hundred years. The next disruption didn’t come until 1949 when a businessman called Frank McNamara came up with a way for customers to pay restaurant bills towards the end of the month — which eventually laid the foundations for credit cards that we used today.
Credit card payment methods have improved over the next few decades and have become more secure and convenient. The “card” evolved from small cardboard cards to plastic cards with card numbers and secure chips for convenient payments. The simple idea of charging payments and pulling transfers out of the payer’s account advanced into more complicated payment logic designed for modern businesses.
Today, credit card networks and their gateway support various payment methods. You could pay with a tap at McDonald’s, subscribe to Netflix, and pay utility bills with credit cards. However, the system remains complicated and expensive for merchants.
Problems of Current Payment Methods
Although card payments are useful, they take a long time to settle and are costly to businesses. Every time we use a credit card to pay for something, it goes through an extended network. It passes through several institutions before we see the “Approved” confirmation message.
The clearing & settlement of funds between the customer and merchant goes through multiple intermediaries, incurring huge fees. Payment gateways can charge merchants up to 4% on successful credit card charges. Customers indirectly pay this fee as businesses pass on the card fees to customers.
Blockchain provides a more efficient and effective way to clear and settle payments. Instead of routing through numerous intermediaries, payments can be sent directly to the merchant. Instead of taking days and costing huge fees along the way, blockchain payments can settle in seconds.
Even though crypto payments are superior, acceptance of crypto payments has not picked up. Here are some of the reasons why:
- Users must sign and send every transaction.
- Making recurring payments is not possible today. Customers have to sign and send transactions every month.
- Paying customer thinks twice about checking out after seeing the gas fees.
- There are blockchains with lower gas fees than Ethereum and faster confirmation speeds. Still, many payment processors do not support it today.
- Hard for businesses to keep track of payments
- Lots of work to keep up with administrative matters such as accounting and paying taxes
Suberra: Accept Payments from Anywhere for Anything
Suberra is the fastest and easiest way for merchants and businesses to accept crypto payments from anywhere for anything.
With just one integration, you can immediately collect crypto payments from anyone. Your customers can:
- Pay from any self-custody wallets such as Metamask, Ledger and Argent;
- Pay from centralised exchanges such as Binance;
- Pay from any blockchain network. We will initially support Ethereum, Polygon and Avalanche, and networks such as Arbitrum, Optimism and BSC are on the roadmap.
- Pay for anything! Subscribe and get access to SaaS platforms via Subscription NFT, buy virtual shoes on metaverse, and pay for on-demand services such as cloud services and developer toolings.
We know it is difficult to stay compliant, do accounting and manage your business and team. Therefore, we have designed these features to help you streamline operations.
- Increase conversions with gasless transactions: Make the checkout experience more seamless for your users by making transactions gasless
- Anti-fraud: Stay compliant by blocking high-risk wallets
- Easy bridging: Collect payments from any chain and automatically bridge them to the same blockchain network
- User management: Add your team members to manage the account and set access controls
- Self-custody: Choose where you want to receive your revenues — it can be any wallet, multisig contracts or even institutional platforms like Fireblocks.
- Business Tools and Integration: Lower the friction for your customers to try your products with discount codes and free trials! And our payments are composable with existing NFT infrastructure and even with tools like Discord, Telegram or Notion.
Get in Touch
If you would like to learn how you can use Suberra and integrate with us, join our waitlist here, and we will be in touch with you shortly!
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