Cardano, other cryptos’ integration into payment systems crucial for merchant adoption

The cryptocurrency landscape tends to be ever-evolving. While constant upgrades are not a crucial requirement for coins like Bitcoin that have already established its use cases, for many altcoins, their developmental spree tends to give tremendous momentum to the coin. Over the past few years, Cardano has cemented itself as a network that is brimming with constant upgrades and developmental projects on its blockchain.

In a recent episode of the Untold Stories podcast, Founder of Cardano and CEO of IOHK – Charles Hoskinson – spoke about the importance of payment systems for merchants and the challenges that hinder the adoption of crypto in this domain. According to Hoskinson,

“The problem with merchant adoption is that not only do you have to integrate with these passes but then there’s also the value stability issue. So, you know, what we’ve seen with merchants historically is that they’ll only take a crypto asset if they have a quick path to either locking in the value or divesting the asset.”

He noted that when it comes to crypto as means of exchange for everyday payments, most merchants are open to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, but still prefer it to be converted to fiat currencies when it eventually makes its way into their bank accounts. He went on to note,

“Conversion step of making it easy for a merchant to accept a cryptocurrency generally is also in the trading and market-making business. They have to have some sort of backend for currency conversion there.”

Hoskinson also highlighted how when it comes to crypto, crypto-merchants do not see themselves as ‘currency speculators,’ and hence, a key property they value is whether or not the currency exhibits remarkably low levels of volatility. While crypto-adoption has been on the rise over the past few years, there are still quite a few challenges in many parts of the world.

Noting that it is important to be able to easily integrate cryptos like Cardano into various payment systems, Hoskinson added,

“We’re probably going to build out some hooks into the standard Cardano software suite that will make it pretty easy to integrate into existing payment solutions. Now, in terms of being able to do fast payments, Hydra one of the ouroboros variant protocols allows us to have fast finalities so you have instant settlement and then it also allows you to do microtransactions.”

Over the past month, Cardano’s developmental efforts and project upgrades have been recognized by the Fundamental Crypto Asset Score [FCAS] giving it five “Superbs” for Code Improvements, Community Involvement, Developer Behavior, Liquidity, and Code Contributions. 2020 is a significant year as the month of May is likely to be the month when IOHK begins rolling out the Shelley infrastructure.