The current year is turning out to be monumental for the crypto industry. Major corporations are adding cryptos to their balance sheet, institutional investors are more confident, and crypto investors are growing exponentially.

One of the biggest news-making rounds is PayPal, Visa, and other payment processing networks offering crypto payments to their users.

Not only does it change the entire crypto adoption equation, but it opens doors for more enterprises to embrace the crypto revolution.

But, some obvious concerns are just too hard to ignore.

PayPal and Visa Offer Crypto Payments: It’s not innovation.

Let’s start with the first one; this isn’t a revolution or any kind of innovation.

As per the current announcement, PayPal will allow crypto users to pay using Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ether, or Litecoin, but the payment processor will settle funds in fiat only.

Retailers will continue paying 3% plus other fees for sales, the same as earlier.

Visa is planning to support USDC while planning to support new central bank digital currencies in the future.

What’s the problem with this approach?

These players merely focus on the commercial value of cryptos instead of their inherent qualities, such as transparency, security, and smart contracts.

Cryptocurrencies serve multiple purposes.
Let’s start with Ethereum.

It supports smart contracts, self-executable codes, which allows enterprises to automate manual, mundane tasks.

Secondly, cryptos offer rewards to users for staking, maintaining the network.

Most importantly, blockchain introduces unparalleled transparency, allowing all participants to verify, cross-check transactions.

PayPal, Visa, or Mastercard embrace none of these qualities and are, at best, riding the crypto wave to stay on top of current trends.

Payments leaders as of today don’t have the infrastructure to support genuine blockchain use cases.

It will take years for those companies to migrate their clients from legacy systems to blockchain technology.

ECB’s Christine Lagarde recently announced that the digital Euro coin will be launched in four years.

Smartlink provides a platform for crypto users to buy or sell products/services with their crypto assets. We provide trust-as-a-service.
Here is how we eliminate trust deficit in commercial transactions:

• Our escrow smart contract offers institutional-grade security for high-value transactions.
• We support formal verification of smart contracts (Tezos), making Smartlink suitable for commercial payments.
• Users can create custom sales agreements using our enforceable templates. Since we use smart contracts, there are no risks of losing your funds. The buyer will get a review period before accepting the delivery and releasing the payment.
• Smartlink reduces transaction charges from 3–5% to 0–1% for payments while providing almost instant settlements.
• Smartlink marketplace provides a platform for selling a wide variety of products and services, including NFTs, digital products, services, and much more. We reduce platform fees from 10–20% (Amazon, eBay) to 0–1%.

Above all, Smartlink is building the technological infrastructure that allows users to take advantage of blockchain technology.

It’s not just about payments anymore. A whole new range of use cases is shaping up along with new economic paradigms.

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