New payment network, Flexa has just been launched and will now allow consumers to pay for purchased items from physical stores using cryptocurrencies. Flexa supports the use of Bitcoin, Ether, Bitcoin Cash and the Gemini Dollar. These digital currencies will be accepted as payment in various retailers including GameStop, Nordstrom, Jamba Juice, Crate and Barrel, and Whole Foods.
Flexa recently released Speedn, a mobile app that generates a QR code that can be scanned at the checkout counter of participating stores. When using cryptocurrencies, merchants receive payment immediately in dollars. Subsequently, the corresponding amount is debited from consumers’ cryptocurrency wallets in real time.
While the payment of consumer goods using cryptocurrencies has been going on for quite some time now, Flexa is upping the system with the ability to process payments immediately, allowing for actual retail transactions in physical stores.
This was made possible because Flexa is using its own cryptocurrency, Flexa coin to secure each transaction before the approval from the originating coin’s network. The company is taking the risk of not getting paid by serving as an intermediary for each payment made using Speedn app.
This may seem a complicated process but it seems Flexa is determined to speed up the process of cryptocurrency transactions at retail outlets to revolutionize the system.
According to Flexa, the existing payments infrastructure that was established a long time ago is outdated and already broken. The use of credit and debit cards in consumer transactions has been too costly for merchants and has been vulnerable to cyber attacks.
This is the reason why the company took the new approach by building connections with merchant point-of-sale terminals starting in 2018. This allowed the Flexa app to bypass the existing payment network and allow merchants to directly authorize cryptocurrency-based payment for consumer items.
It’s still early to say if Flexa will revolutionize the payment system but what Flexa has done could pave the way for the evolution of traditional point-of-sale terminals. It’s up to consumers whether they will embrace digital currencies or not despite the prevailing security threats and unstable nature of cryptocurrencies.
