Solana Pay carries on to change the payments landscape. The first totally decentralised payments rail has caught the hearts and minds of retailers and developers seeking a modern solution to bring commerce activity on chain only three months after its inception. Solana Pay was used by many of the 130+ competitors in the inaugural payments track of the just finished SOL Riptide hackathon.
Solana Pay has taken another step ahead by making transaction requests available to developers and merchants. The SOL pay had previously relied on one-way SOL, USDC, NFTs, and other token transfers. These were excellent starting points for completely decentralised payment systems.
However, thanks to transaction requests, any SOL transaction can now be brought into the real world by a participatory request between a checkout app and a mobile wallet, enabling NFT minting, dynamic discounts, tokenized loyalty programs, and much more. It works like this:
- The customer scans a merchant QR code, which is translated into a Solana Pay transaction request URL by their wallet app.
- The wallet makes an HTTP request to the merchant API.
- The merchant receives the customer’s wallet address in the request and can respond with a bespoke transaction.
- The wallet, like any other transaction, displays the transaction data to the customer, as well as a merchant URL and icon.
- The customer signs the transaction with their private key and sends it to the network, approving (or declining) it.
Initial use cases for Solana developers to explore
Transaction requests increase the power of a simple purchase by permitting any SOL transaction.
- Customers can communicate with merchants in a truly bi-directional manner. At the moment of sale, they can atomically mint an NFT or transfer loyalty tokens.
- Refunds, chargebacks, insurance, buy-now-pay-later, discounts, rewards, and yield creation are all possible with composable DeFi transactions incorporating borrowing, swaps, escrow, and more.
- Merchants can pay for transaction fees, token account setup, and NFT minting on behalf of their consumers, removing the need for them to keep SOL in their wallet and lowering the friction of interacting with the Solana ecosystem.
- Merchants can refuse to reply to a transaction request, which could be employed to allow permissioned transactions, such as when compliance requires authentication.
- Consider alternatives to payments. Customers can receive tokens, invitations, and prizes from merchants and brands who offer dynamic experiences. Check out mtnPay’s Booth app, which uses transaction requests to mint 1:1 NFTs for consumers.
However, at the time of writing, SOL was priced at $82.86 and had plunged by 5.22% over the last 24 hours.