PumaPay protocol is revolutionizing everyday payments with blockchain and cryptocurrencies

History will tell you that it takes years, if not decades, for a new new technology to reach a widespread adoption. Cryptocurrency is not an exception. For example, it took 28 years for credit card to reach 50 million users. Recently, we witnessed pushbacks from countries like India, China and regulatory agencies blocking the use of cryptocurrencies. However, cyrptocurrencies are to stay and are not going away. In fact, as technology becomes more mature, many of these countries may have to rethink their policies and make a change. As cryptocurrency permeates our everyday lives, other form payment like credit card has no choice but evolve to incorporate cryptocurrency benefits as part of their offerings.

Even though the cryptocurrency is very popular among the early adopters as means of payment, it is still not widely used among everyday people or general as another means of payment like credit cards. Today, not many people or stores accept cryptocurrency as a means of payment for things like paying for coffee, dinner, taxi, haircut, or other everyday payments. However, that’s about to change. One company is on a mission to change it.

Introducing, PumaPay

PumaPay is a comprehensive blockchain-based billing and pull protocol solution which offers robust payment mechanisms far more credible, efficient, flexible, cost-effective, and scalable than current implementations (credit cards). Unlike today’s payment methods, which include credit cards and virtual coins like Bitcoin, the Pull Payment Protocol was designed from the ground up specifically to overcome existing hurdles and offers a set of tools developed to facilitate onboarding processes for both businesses and individuals.

PumaPay’s team is made up of high-volume transaction experts. They are well-aware of the fact that credit cards, the foundation of online billing and payments, were never fully adapted to the world of digital trade. They have experienced firsthand the issues merchants face daily thanks to an outdated system of transaction processing. It didn’t take much for us to see the potential of blockchain to solve these problems. Their mission is to modernize payment processing systems and lay the foundations for a thriving cryptocurrency economy built on the PumaPay Pull Payment Protocol. The Protocol is designed to:

With PumaPay merchants can:

• Plug-in various billing solutions to enable acceptance of cryptocurrencies directly, replacing credit card companies and other billing processors
• Offer customers comprehensive and flexible billing solution, addressing all common billing practices, including recurring, pay-per-use, etc
• Eliminate risks of fraud and chargebacks and associated fines.
• Saves the exorbitant middlemen and intermediaries transaction fees ranging from ~3% to as high as ~15%
• Improves trust between customers and businesses with special security and privacy extensions.
• Emergency crypto transcripts with business directly, rather than through an additional layer of excessive banking.
• Adapt to billing solutions to online and offline e-commerce outlets.

PumaPay comes with a lot of benefits. It standardizes and enables comprehensive payment methods over the blockchain. It decentralizes the billing layer and save substantial intermediary costs for merchants.  It increases the use of cryptocurrency both online and offline and facilitate it as a standard means of payment. It enables powerful launch partners to disrupt their industries by creating a decentralized version of their platforms.

The PumaPay Pull Payment Protocol

PumaPay is a free, open-source, blockchain based payment protocol featuring the unique architecture of PullPayment: Smart contracts that invert the mechanics of common cryptocurrency operations. Cryptocurrencies were designed to allow only one type of transaction – sending money from side A to side B, also known as ‘push.’ Their PullPayment Protocol enables a ‘pull’ action on the blockchain, allowing side B to connect to side A’s address via a PullContract and ‘pull’ funds into side B account. This is, of course, subject to predefined terms and prior acceptance of the transaction by side A.

PumaPay’s Protocol was designed from the ground up to facilitate flexibility in transaction mechanics. The innovative architecture opens the door to a whole universe of payments mechanisms that are either impossible or unfeasible when relying only on a ‘push’ action: Subscription fees, direct debit, pay-per-use, and more. The protocol is highly flexible and adaptable, giving businesses the opportunity to apply their processing business logic on the blockchain.

Here’s how it works:

PumaPay is built on the backbone of the Ethereum network and using the most recent ERC233 token standard. This is important to note because among other things, ERC233 removes the risk of tokens being lost due to incorrect contract executions. This StackExchange thread top response covers the differences well.

The Protocol and Token.

The PumaPay Protocol will be open to the community for development. While the protocol comes with built in modules to facilitate the main payments types outlined here, it is designed to encourage community development. It aims to become a standard platform that business can use to develop their custom blockchain payment solution. The ‘PMA’ token will be the currency exchanged amongst users’ PumaPay Wallets. While initially, users will exchange ETH for PMA tokens, it’s ongoing value will be based on the general PMA market and it will be the stand-alone cryptocurrency on the system.

PumaPay currently has an ongoing bounty campaign. You can join their bounty campaign for a total of $200,000 in PMA token:

Below is a video with overview of how PumaPay works.