W ouldn’t it be awesome if you could top up your mobile phone data or gas card for your car using Obyte?

These utilities are the types of products that most of us pay significant sums of money for on a regular basis, so you could easily start using cryptocurrency to pay for things you actually use, instead of just hoping your wallet balance goes up in value.

However, if you are a major telecom operator or energy supplier, why accept Bytes, or any other cryptocurrency for that matter? For much of the world current payment systems work fine, and from what we can see there isn’t much demand from consumers to pay with cryptocurrency, at least not at the scale that might make huge businesses consider adding it as a direct payment option.

Developer Yuzhi Liu from the Obyte community in China recently launched Lifepay to address this issue. This could be a significant step in getting people to actually use crypto in the real world…which is why we are all here.

How Lifepay works in brief:

Visit Lifepay Select the service you wish to top up Follow the instructions to pay with Obyte Bytes Lifepay credits your account after your Obyte payment is confirmed

Pretty easy, right? No need to sit and wait for China Mobile to directly accept Bytes, instead simply use a bridge built by the Obyte community in China. Lifepay was launched a few months ago, and just added popular new services to which users can add credit to:

Travel (train tickets)

Gas (PetroChina and Sinopec )

Entertainment

How it works — specific examples

Depending on the service you are topping up the steps vary, here are some specific illustrations on how to use Lifepay:

Mobile credit/data top up

Select top up

Fill in the required information and confirm it on next step

Scan or click the QR code to pay with your Obyte wallet

Receive mobile/data credit once your Obyte payment is stable

Book train tickets

This covers all types of trains both regular and high-speed rail.

Select Book Now under the Train section;

The first time you use Lifepay for train tickets you need to create a free account:

After registration, login and add passenger information.

Select the train tickets menu, check available train schedules and follow the instructions to book the tickets.

You have 15 minutes to make the payment once selection confirmed:

Top up Sinopec and PetroChina gas cards

In China you can pay for gas for your car by topping up a card issued by Sinopec or PetroChina.

Select Refill Now under the gas section;

Similar steps as the train tickets; login in the panel, add gas cards then choose gas card refill, follow the instructions to pay with Bytes and get refilled after the payment is confirmed by Obyte.

Recharge entertainment accounts (from Tencent Vips, iQiyi video, Mango TV, Kugou Music and Sohu members.)

Select Recharge Now under the Entertainment section;

Similar steps as before; login, choose Entertainment recharge, follow the instructions to pay with Bytes and get your entertainment account recharged after payment confirmed by Obyte network.

As you can see from the image above, Entertainment in China seems to cover a lot more than the word in English, at least in this example.

Other ways the Lifepay model can fit

There are usually several payment methods available online e.g. credit card, Paypal or bank transfers. However in order to use such payment options, you usually need to have already completed KYC, and belong to the current banking world.

“Banking the unbanked” has been a publication relations angle of various crypto focused articles, but this doesn’t seem to have happened. Few merchants offer crypto as a payment option as there is little demand, and most protocols are not ready for such high volumes.

Unbanked doesn’t necessarily mean less developed countries

Given how much most of us rely on our bank facilities, it’s easy to think of the unbanked as citizens of less developed countries. That’s not necessarily the case. The Federal Reserve estimated there are 55 million unbanked or underbanked adult Americans in 2018. In the U.K. around 50% of the unbanked don’t even want to be banked!

Lifepay enables people that are not part of the banking systems to make use of services that are usually only available to those that are, as well as giving those that already are part of the current banking world a way to pay for everyday services they use using Bytes.

* Lifepay is only available in China, but there is nothing to stop other Obbies building a similar service for the country they live in.