Blockchain Services Firm Claims Instant Cross-Border Payments

BlockCypher, a company that positions itself as a blockchain “web services” provider for the corporate realm has claimed that it can now facilitate near-instant cross-border payments.

As bitcoin and blockchain-based innovation continues to disrupt the payments industry with quicker settlements at a lower cost, one Fintech firm with a focus in the B2B space claims it can now deliver on the promise of instant cross-border settlements at a fraction of the costs incurred with existing avenues, like SWIFT.

BllockCypher is a provider of web services that notably enables bitcoin wallet services for the likes of payment providers and exchanges .

In an announcement, Catheryne Nicholson, founder and CEO of California-based BlockCypher stated:

Many companies are addressing the cost and processing times of interntional payments. It’s too expensive and slow.

BlockCypher executes almost-instantaneous payments and is used worldwide. It’s real and in production today. It’s not a theoretical 80+ people design-phase POC (proof of concept).

The company’s payments platform shows a handful of offerings to clients who can plug in to several APIs. The suite includes:

• Confidence Factor API – the probability of whether a transaction will be confirmed is calculated in seconds. BlockCypher’s biggest offering.
• Webhook API – identifies fraud and attempts to double-spend.
• Transaction API – enables creation and propagation of all transactions, including those with multi-signatures.
• Address API – validates and obtains details of an address
• Ethereum APIs – smart contracts are enabled and can be triggered by rules.

The firm adds that its offerings are already in production for clients in various parts of the world including Africa, Asia, South America and Europe. Its API is being used in over 50 countries to scale over 15 million API calls in a day. BlockCypher also claims that companies using its toolkit have reduced developer costs by 35%.

BlockCypher initially made its mark with support for bitcoin blockchain applications. Over a year ago in June 2015, BlockCypher pointed to the viability of zero confirmation transactions without a double spend, due to its Confidence Factor APi. In June this year, the blockchain firm announced support for Ethereum, enabling companies to build applications using the Ethereum protocol without requiring blockchain infrastructure.

Agnostic toward permissioned or permission-less ledgers, BlockCypher APis are available on public blockchains like bitcoin and Ethereum as well as private chains.

Images from Shutterstock and BlockCypher.