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The big card networks have been introducing a one-click e-commerce checkout and plan to take it overseas by next year, but now a Ripple Labs Inc. executive may beat them to the punch with a single-click capability for Ripple’s XRP cryptocurrency.
In what he characterizes as a “personal project,” Ripple director of product Craig DeWitt announced some enhancements over the weekend that add instant person-to-person payments capability and one-click checkouts to Payburner, a digital wallet for XRP that DeWitt introduced in December.
The new features, which are part of a beta launch, also include an integration with PayID, a cross-network routing standard introduced in June by the Open Payments Coalition, a group of 46 payments companies that includes Ripple. The standard looks to attach an identifier that allows transactions to flow to and from accounts without the need for bank-account numbers.
At $9.65 billion, XRP is the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, according to Coinmarketcap.com. One XRP is worth about 22 cents at exchange rates current late Sunday. “Payburner’s role is to build an excellent and sustainable payment platform leveraging the best in class digital asset for payments, XRP,” says DeWitt in a weekend post on Medium.
To receive instant payments via the new streamlined checkout, online merchants must have incorporated a Payburner wallet, but buyers need only be able to spend XRP. “Anyone with a website can receive XRP payments easily,” writes DeWitt in his post. The new feature, he adds, is aimed at sellers of both physical and digital goods.
“If you’ve got a website or internet property that you’d like to monetize by receiving payments, Payburner Paybuttons allow you to set up the payment experience easily,” DeWitt writes. “As an example we created spud.store from scratch in less than 20 min. There’s no signup process or bank account required.” Spud.store, which sells potatoes, is a test site DeWitt set up for demonstration purposes.
But the new experience isn’t without merchant charges. “We expect to make money from the 1-click merchant payout experience by requesting payments from merchants at 1% of their received XRP ecommerce purchases,” the post says. Person-to-person payments and payment requests, however, are free.
The latest single-click e-commerce checkout comes as consumer frustration with cluttered checkout pages has led American Express Co., Discover Financial Services, Mastercard Inc.. and Visa Inc. to launch their new common buy button, Click to Pay, which the networks plan to expand to 14 international markets next year.
Ripple has been among the most active digital currencies for payments purposes, particularly for cross-border commerce. In November, the San Francisco-based company invested $20 million in MoneyGram International Inc. The capital injection came on top of a previous $30-million investment and gave Ripple a nearly 10% interest in the global money-transfer network.
