Blue Star Capital plc (AIM: BLU), the investing company with a focus on new technologies, has told DirectorsTalk that its investee company, SatoshiPay Ltd a UK incorporated private nanopayment software and blockchain company in which Blue Star owns approximately 19 per cent of the equity (expected to increase to 31 per cent subject to completion of the further investment in SatoshiPay announced by the Company on 4 July 2017), has agreed a proof of concept project with the IOTA Foundation to explore replacing Bitcoin with an alternative cryptocurrency, IOTA, as SatoshiPay’s settlement network.
Since its 2015 product launch SatoshiPay has relied on the Bitcoin network to settle nanopayments. Initially Bitcoin transaction fees were negligible at below EUR0.01 per transaction. Due to Bitcoin’s rising popularity in 2017, combined with stalling scalability improvements, the network’s transaction limit is regularly reached, leading to congestion and an increase in fees to uneconomical levels. To sustain and enhance SatoshiPay’s business model based on frequent low-value payments, SatoshiPay is seeking to replace Bitcoin with a more suitable distributed ledger technology.
The IOTA network, with its token listed as 9th largest cryptocurrency on coinmarketcap.com at a market cap of EUR450m, offers zero-fee transactions with no limit on the number of transactions per second, making it unique among cryptocurrencies and an ideal ledger technology for SatoshiPay’s future needs.
While corporate entities such as Innogy, Canonical, Bosch, Cisco and Microsoft are building IOTA prototypes focussed on the Internet of things, SatoshiPay is IOTA Foundation’s first partner to build a purely web-based application.
The results of the project are expected to be available in August 2017.
Tony Fabrizi, CEO of Blue Star said: “Working with the IOTA Foundation allows SatoshiPay to explore new technology with a clear focus on scalability of its business. We are excited about the potential new opportunities that could open up from this initiative and that SatoshiPay is taking steps to optimise its business model”.
SatoshiPay CEO Meinhard Benn said: “Working with the IOTA Foundation allows us to explore cutting edge technology with a clear focus on scalability and mass market roll-out. We couldn’t be more excited and expect plenty of exposure and new opportunities to open up”
