Square Gets Patent For Real-Time Crypto-To-Fiat Swaps

The mobile payment and financial services company and app Square gets patent for crypto in real-time point-of-sale transactions. The company, owned by the Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, was awarded the patent from the United States Patent Office (USPTO) because of the revolutionary technology that the team thinks will crack a present barrier in merchant transactions.

“All cryptocurrencies face the same drawback in that they are not widely accepted. Presently, cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin, are not accepted by most retail merchants, or even by most online merchants,” the post reads.

As the team at Square gets patent for this application, they cited a number of drawbacks to current crypto spending. For instance, they said that transactions take a while to process and that minor advances still defy practical timeframes – such as buying a hypothetical cup of coffee in a transaction which the blockchain could take hours to record.

The blockchain news also show that the anonymity of cryptocurrencies is what exposes merchants to potential criminal activity like money laundering. There is also the money angle, as the fluctuation of the crypto exchange rates poses a financial risk to all business owners.

However, Square gets patent for crypto-to-fiat real time swaps and its technology now aims at full reporting. The tech would receive a request for payment in the consumer’s asset of choice while using a privacy coin – and approve this for the merchant to get full value in their asset of choice and in real-time.

Even though Square did not fully explain its technology or speak about its work (and its point of sale devices), a spokesperson declined to confirm a specific pending usage for the newly patented system.

Aside from the news that Square gets patent for fiat-to-crypto transactions, earlier this year we saw that the payment app announced the start of a Lighting Development Kit (LDK) on its blog. Larger than a node, this kit would customize experiences for wallet as well as app developments. It will include an API, language bindings and demo apps. As the blog post detailed, the shaky structure of the Lighting would lead to many improvements in the future as well as low-fee Bitcoin payments “as common as cash used to be.”