At COTI, we’ve come a long way since our early beginnings, achieving a number of milestones on our path to becoming the Currency of the Internet. One of our most significant accomplishments to date has been the design of our Trustchain consensus protocol.

The payment platform COTI PAY will be the first use case of the Trustchain, enabling users and merchants to begin transacting in COTI. The response has been outstanding, with over 50,000 users and 4,500 merchants eager to join the alpha net launch this upcoming August.

Until now, the number of users who have signed up from the start of April has grown exponentially to approximately 60,000 users.

Our merchant onboarding is also edging higher and has reached close to 5,000 sign-ups!

The demand is palpable, as traditional payment systems are complex and convoluted and cost consumers billions of dollars every year due to high fees paid by merchants driving up product costs for consumers. When coupled with falsely declined transactions and long settlement periods, merchant profits and cash flow are further reduced. Complicated multi-currency support, high spreads and exchange rates also negatively impact both parties. Over two billion people around the world remain unbanked as a result of these inefficiencies common to traditional payment systems.

Cryptocurrencies were the first revolutionary technology to disrupt this industry, but have largely failed to address these issues due to scalability challenges, volatile prices, lack of buyer-seller protections, a complicated user experience and the absence of regulation.

By leveraging the Trustchain consensus protocol, COTI PAY will be positioned to reconcile the best of traditional payments with leading digital currency advancements.

For consumers, the benefits are clear with COTI boasting instant transactions, low-to-zero fees, buyer-seller protections, a user-friendly interface and more. We’ve also developed a suite of merchant tools and services that will make COTI a compelling proposition for merchants.

Merchants that use COTI’s services will be able to enjoy a better bottom line as they’ll be equipped to process more transactions and pay almost zero fees. They will also benefit from instant settlements, low rolling reserve requirements, hedging services to protect against price volatility and a regulated payment ecosystem. Even better, all COTI applications integrate seamlessly with merchant websites to ensure a streamlined checkout process.

For more information on joining the COTI network as a user or merchant, please visit coti.io.