HandCash and Anypay implement peer-to-peer Checkouts for both retail and online payments.
Weeks ago, we announced in conjunction with Money Button, our efforts in making Bitcoin work in a peer to peer fashion again, as intended by its designer, Dr. Craig Steven Wright — AKA “Satoshi Nakamoto”. This new peer to peer protocol finally allows the application layer to decouple its scalability from the growth of the small world miner layer.
Today, we are announcing that both HandCash and Anypay have implemented the famous BIP270 protocol: a peer-to-peer (customer-to-merchant in this case) payments communication standard. It provides both online and retail merchants with safer, faster and more efficient checkouts.
While P2P Paymail acts basically as a push transaction protocol, P2P Checkouts is a full BIP270 implementation where transaction structure negotiation is possible. Also, payment related data is exchanged like, for example, invoice information.
This makes it possible for non-custodial wallets and merchants like Anypay to earn Bitcoin without ever holding their customers’ money, and saving them money and bureaucracy in money transmitter and custodial licenses.
Plus, they no longer need to run a full node to monitor the whole Blockchain — wallets like HandCash will send them the transaction directly to them, and they just have to verify it. It’s a huge win in efficiency and operational costs.
Key benefits
- Payments that do not comply with the merchant’s requirements can be rejected before being broadcasted to the miner layer.
- The ability to set prices in fiat currencies, so the calculation with the current exchange rate is done every time.
- Improvements in user experience and reduced support tickets as the new format does not allow for wallets to send the wrong kind of token.
- There is no nothing new to learn from the user’s perspective as it will still work for QR code payments, deep links, NFC and mostly any other format.
- Compatibility with Miner ID and Merchant API. This allows payment processors to get the lowest fee rates for each checkout, and improves reliability by making sure the payment will be processed by miners.
- Its ability to pay to multiple recipients (other companies, individuals and organizations) in just one invoice brings unlimited creativity for designing new types of payments.
- Merchants can include a signed receipt ID inside the transaction.
- These checkout payments can be tokenized, for traceability and transparency reasons, for platforms like TrueReviews where it can help keeping with the integrity of the information submitted.
This improvements will require updating HandCash and Anypay apps, but websites already using Anypay for checkouts won’t need to do anything.
Give it a try!
See for yourself how blazing fast p2p payments are by shopping for 250+ major retailers and paying with HandCash at egifter.com, as they already use the new checkout system by Anypay. Bitcoin checkouts just became great!
Thank you guys!
We would like to thank Steven Zeiler and Derrick Freeman of Anypay for their professionalism, expertise and insights on retail and online checkouts — a sector they know better than anybody else!
Also special acknowledgments to Brandon Bryant, former Anypay engineer and now part of the HandCash team, for his excellent work along with our senior HandCash Cloud engineer Ivan Mlinarić. Both have been working side by side for a few weeks now and we couldn’t be happier about the results!
Both teams collaborated in the most professional manner, and are proud of making this new checkout protocol available for other payment processors and wallets to implement. It’s beautiful to see how through collaboration, we are bringing Bitcoin back to its roots, and working better than ever before!
