We often get asked what is the difference between GRAFT and some other project. Field of retail payments in general is a very large space ($14 trillion / yr) with lots of use cases, lots of solutions, lots of innovation, and lots of competition. Blockchain in particular has attracted a high level of interest (both legitimate and those looking to leverage the hype) when it comes to payments, with solutions focusing primarily on either creating a cryptocurrency that’s r/etail friendly, or accepting other cryptocurrencies at the point of sale. While GRAFT is starting out by addressing both of these use cases, the goal is to: do it the right way (as in not compromise on principles where it counts)

set up for large scale and high rate of growth

set up for rapid expansion in use cases

With that said, we believe that a blockchain-based payment network has to have the following characteristics in order to provide the right basis and be scalable, robust, flexible, and universally appealing – it has to be decentralized for scalability and flexibility, open source for robustness and trust, fast, private “at rest”, open platform for flexibility, and currency agnostic for universal appeal.

Chart below provides a general idea of what makes GRAFT Network stand out from competition. The extra requirements is also reason why it has taking us significant time to do what we’ve set out to do as if it was quick and easy, others would have done it by now.

Of course this list of competitors is not exhaustive, but it’s representative of the types of competition GRAFT is currently facing: 1) blockchains that allow real-time transactions in their own currency, 2) payment gateways attached to digital currency exchanges, 3) custom terminals with ERC20 based solutions. We had chosen Dash*, Spedn by Flexa, and PundiX** as representative of these categories, but could have chosen others as well.

*Notably, FB Libra could replace Dash in this table as it has similar properties.

** Not much is published about the design specifics of PundiX solution so we’re going off the fact that it’s ERC20 token based and as any smart contract has to be processed by the underlying smart contract blockchain. We don’t know how they accomplish transaction speed or multi-currency support given the underlying technology.