Covid-19 has been a blight on retailers and merchants around the world, but running a business that accepts electronic payments was an arduous feat before the pandemic. Card fraud, chargebacks and payment processing fees all cost large retailers billions of dollars each year, but smaller merchants with fewer resources to combat fraud and dispute chargebacks suffer even more.
Traditional credit card payments require a multistep verification process and impose fees that cost merchants up to 5% of each transaction. Tamper-proof cryptocurrency payments have the potential to drastically reduce fraud and processing costs. But in order for this system to gain widespread adoption, it will have to be easy to implement and meet the needs of merchants and consumers.
Imagine a world where you can walk into any store and pay instantly with any cryptocurrency. Flexa is poised to make this world a reality, by helping brands transition to accepting cryptocurrency with zero risk and minimal overhead. Flexa’s network allows any merchant to accept instant, guaranteed, collateralized payments in dozens of digital currencies while receiving payouts in their own preferred currency.
Co-Founder and VP of Engineering Zachary Kilgore leads software development for the Flexa network and helped create the first implementation of the Flexa collateral manager. He said Flexa simplifies payment settlement by transacting directly between customers and merchants without sending sensitive information or relying on a myriad of middlemen. By using distributed ledger technologies to validate transactions, Flexa facilitates fraud-proof payments that lower merchant fees to less than 1%.
Flexa is easily implemented by any merchant, requiring no additional hardware or software installation. With an initial focus on dining, entertainment and clothing retailers, Flexa is currently used at over 41,336 locations throughout the U.S. and Canada. In addition to creating a simple, streamlined experience for merchants to accept crypto payments like any other form of payment, Flexa’s distributed token network decentralizes risk, allowing for cheaper, faster, more secure cryptocurrency payments.
In March, Flexa Capacity integrated Chainlink’s widely adopted Price Feeds (including BTC/USD, ETH/USD, DAI/USD and AMP/USD) to obtain tamperproof, fair-market exchange rates for each of the digital currencies it supports. Kilgore said Chainlink allows Flexa to have confidence in asset prices as it continues to decentralize core systems. “Now the network has the flexibility to ingest canonical pricing data into off-chain systems, while migrating components of these systems on-chain for further transparency and auditability.”
With Chainlink solving the need for accurate, real-time pricing data at scale, Kilgore said Flexa is free to focus on building its merchant-focused payments network aimed at widespread cryptocurrency adoption. He hinted at even more to come from the integrations between Flexa and Chainlink: “Together we developed some new ideas that will be implemented in upcoming product releases. Flexa and its users (both consumers and merchants) will see a lot of value from this integration.”
To learn more about Flexa, check out their website, blog, Twitter and Discord.
Read more about Chainlink’s latest integrations here.
Elizabeth Licorish is a writer and author whose work has appeared in HuffPost, PhillyVoice and Bustle. In 2008, she wrote and co-authored Innovation for Underdogs. In 2010, she wrote and edited Charles Manson Now. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction from Rutgers University and has ghostwritten hundreds of executive thought leadership pieces for some of the world’s leading experts across diverse industries. She has been writing and editing for influential blockchain projects since 2017, when she fell in love with decentralized finance’s potential to empower individuals in an economically just world. As the editor-in-chief of Chainlink Today, she’s passionate about telling the human stories behind some of the most promising technology in the fastest-growing blockchain ecosystem.