Elrond bets big on web3 payments in 2022 with the acquisition of leading crypto payments provider Utrust

We covered Elrond back in May after the creators of the internet-scale blockchain partnered with Holoride to introduce blockchain and NFTs for the world’s first immersive in-vehicle media platform. Since then, Elrond has grown exponentially and its blockchain network now scales beyond 100,000 transactions per second.

With its blockchain success, Elrond is betting big on Web3 payments in 2022 with the acquisition of the leading crypto payments provider Utrust. In an announcement today, Elrond said it acquired Utrust to make payments faster, cheaper, and more secure by using blockchain technology. The acquisition will also enable Elrond to transform payment processing services from a cost for merchants into an income stream.

Founded in 2017 by Artur Goulão, Filipe Castro, Nuno Correia, and Roberto Machado, the Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal-based Utrust helps merchants easily accept digital currencies for goods, and helps buyers pay with them. Utrust is the leading cryptocurrency payment solution designed to modernize the financial and payments industry and solve the problems of traditional payment methods by enabling immediate transactions, buyer protection, and instant settlements for merchants.

Elrond has developed groundbreaking blockchain technology that is intended to serve as the backbone for a new, high bandwidth, low latency, inexpensive financial system that becomes accessible to anyone anywhere.

By acquiring Utrust, the world’s first crypto payment solution to offer instant transactions, buyer protection, and crypto-to-cash settlements, Elrond together with Utrust intends to revolutionize eCommerce and payments.

The goal is to first make payments fully natively digital by using blockchain to offer near-instant and secure global settlements at a trivial cost, accessible to merchants worldwide, and second, to bring powerful DeFi mechanics into play to create a paradigm shift via Merchant Yield products.

“At their best, payments should happen near-instantly, globally, and at a trivial cost. Enabling this for merchants worldwide is our primary goal. The second product we will be working on together with the newest member of the Elrond family is Merchant Yield, a DeFi-first payment processing solution that will provide yield for merchants, instead of requiring them to pay a percentage of the transacted value. The implications are hard to overstate.” said Beniamin Mincu, Elrond Network CEO.

For context, in a fully digital world payment processors still offer slow settlement times, and charge merchants anywhere between 3% – 11% of each transaction, an amount that is often the difference between profitability and bankruptcy for a lot of businesses worldwide.

By using state of the art blockchain technology to make payments fully and natively digital, we not only increase the settlement speeds and significantly decrease the costs associated with receiving a payment, but transforming them into a scalable revenue stream, merchants anywhere will be able to bring more of the multi-trillion dollar crypto market into their business and earn on every transaction they receive, instead of paying for it.

“The idea of payments turning from a cost into a revenue stream sounded as crazy to us as it does to anyone thinking about it for the first time. After exploring this together with Elrond, we not only realized that this is possible, but also that it is the inevitable future of payments. So we decided to join forces and accelerate the implementation of DeFi payments.” said Sanja Kon, Utrust CEO.

Powered by the Elrond technology, Utrust enters a new growth chapter. One with significant ramifications for internet commerce and merchants worldwide.

Elrond is the internet-scale blockchain, designed from scratch to bring a 1000-fold cumulative improvement in throughput and execution speed. To achieve this, Elrond introduces two key innovations: a novel Adaptive State Sharding mechanism, and a Secure Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithm, enabling linear scalability with a fast, efficient, and secure consensus mechanism. Thus, Elrond can process upwards of 15,000 transactions per second (TPS), with 6-second latency, and negligible cost, attempting to become the backbone of a permissionless, borderless, globally accessible internet economy.