Elrond Foundation Merges With Crypto Payments Firm Utrust: Report

Elrond Foundation merged with the crypto payments company Utrust with plans to combine Defi with payments in the product dubbed “Merchant Yield” so let’s read further in our latest blockchain news.

The Elrond Foundation is an Ethereum-competitor that touted throughput on the order of 100,000 transactions per second and now it acquired Utrust is a Portugal-based crypto payments firm. The terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed yet but both platforms have tokens and the two companies said the combined community will be updated earlier this year on the final mechanics of the deal from the token holder perspective.

Allowing online payments to take advantage of Web3 as the next generation of the Internet built around decentralized applications is the goal of Elrond and Utrust. Once the Utrust payment gateway was integrated into Elrond as the next step involves offering merchants access to defi and blockchain staking or “Merchant Yield.” The plan is to transform the payment processing services from the cost of merchants into the income stream. Both of the companies said they welcome a close collab with the financial regulators and the focus for an initial rollout in Europe.

The way things work is the payment processors offer slow settlement times and charge merchants between 3% and 11% of the transactions according to Elrond Network CEO Beniamin Mincu:

“A superlative version of payments that’s flawless, instant and inexpensive anywhere in the world is already a great step forward. But what if, instead of charging a merchant X% per month to process transactions, they can receive this yield, to compensate for what they are spending on fees and maybe have a 5% yield in addition?”

Under the hood, the Merchant Yield application will enter the beta testing in the first half of the year but it will comprise various tiers of risk vs returns, ranging from staking on the proof of stake blockchain to taking part in the DEFI protocols. Educating merchants with a simple explanation of the new yield product will be of huge importance said Mincu who didn’t name any Defi platform at this time.

The CEO of Utrust Sanja Kon, is regulated in Estonia and now processes payments in BTC, ETH, USDT and Dash but also in its own UTK token and now Elrond eGold says merchants are much more amenable to settling in crypto. As far as earning yields on another crypto, Kon believes the merchants want to invest in the blockchain space. Kon said in an interview:

“It’s a way for merchants to have their stake in this space and a more diversified treasury. We really want to change how people pay and get paid. Traditional payments are incentivized more in the way of large marketplaces and large merchants, instead of giving everyone the opportunity to do business. And that’s what we want to do.”