PRESS RELEASE: IOTA

SatoshiPay, a blockchain-based nanopayments company that enables digital transactions on a micro-scale, today announced its partnership with the IOTA Foundation to explore replacing Bitcoin with IOTA as the company’s settlement network.

17 July 2017

Since its 2015 product launch SatoshiPay relied on the Bitcoin network to settle nanopayments. Initially Bitcoin transaction fees were negligible at below €0.01 per transaction of any amount. Due to Bitcoin’s rising popularity in 2017, combined with stalling scalability improvements, the network’s transaction limit regularly gets hit, leading to congestions and fees rising to uneconomical levels.

To sustain its business model based on frequent low-value payments, SatoshiPay is seeking to replace Bitcoin with a much more suitable distributed ledger technology.

SatoshiPay CEO Meinhard Benn said: “We love Bitcoin for its pioneering role in the creation of our industry, but some blockchain networks it inspired have evolved faster than Bitcoin itself, so we decided to move on to superior technology.”

The IOTA network, with its token listed as 8th largest cryptocurrency on coinmarketcap.com at a market cap of €460m, offers zero-fee transactions and does not limit the number of transactions per second, making it unique among cryptocurrencies and an ideal ledger technology for SatoshiPay’s future needs.

The IOTA Foundation and SatoshiPay agreed to work on a proof-of-concept project supported by the IOTA Ecosystem Fund, combining SatoshiPay’s frictionless content payment interface with IOTA’s scalable ledger technology.

The results of the joint proof-of-concept are expected to be presented in August 2017. Users of the upcoming project website will be given free IOTA tokens to try out instant payments for digital content like videos, images or downloads.

While corporates such as Innogy, Canonical, Bosch, Cisco and Microsoft are building IOTA prototypes focussed on the Internet of things, SatoshiPay is the IOTA Foundation’s first partner to build a purely web-based application.

“Working with the IOTA Foundation allows us to explore bleeding edge technology with a clear focus on massive scalability. We couldn’t be more excited and expect plenty of exposure and new opportunities to open up” said Benn. David Sønstebø, founder IOTA Foundation commented: “SatoshiPay pioneered the micropayment business model, while IOTA supplies the technology that makes it a reality, therefore this collaboration is a natural fit.”

About SatoshiPay

SatoshiPay is headquartered in London with development led through its office in Berlin. Angel funding for SatoshiPay Ltd was supplied by Axel Springer Plug & Play and Henning Peters. Seed funding was raised through Jim Mellon, Huiyin Blockchain Venture and publicly listed company Blue Star Capital (LON:BLU). Development of SatoshiPay’s nanopayment product started in April 2015 and its beta version was released in February 2016. Find frequently updated information at the company’s website https://satoshipay.io, its blog https://medium.com/@SatoshiPay and Twitter @SatoshiPay.

About IOTA Foundation

The IOTA Foundation is a non-profit foundation currently in formation in Germany, with the purpose of developing, maintaining and standardizing new open source protocols based on distributed ledger technologies (DLT). The IOTA tangle provides a revolutionary open source DLT which is scalable, lightweight and makes it possible to transfer value or data without any fees. Find more information about IOTA at http://iota.org or Twitter @iotatoken.

Contact

Meinhard Benn

Co-founder and CEO

meinhard@satoshipay.io

https://satoshipay.io

Twitter: @meinharrd