Solana Pay: the future of crypto-payments?
Blockchains clearly outperform traditional payment systems regarding large value transfers, but the situation is reversed when it comes to "buy a cup of coffee" payments. Transactions take longer to process and cost more than Visa, for example. For small everyday purchases, cryptocurrencies are still losing to their traditional counterparts. However, the Solana Pay ecosystem has a chance to turn the tide.
What is Solana Pay?
Solana Pay is a framework for creating payment applications and acceptance points for online commerce in the Solana blockchain. It makes it possible to accept payments in USDC stablecoins, Solana coins (SOL), and other assets via QR codes. The transaction fee is minimal (about $0.003 as of January 2025), and the payment is processed almost instantly. Solana Pay is quite capable of competing with traditional payment systems like Visa and MasterCard regarding throughput. This indicator reaches 65 thousand transactions per second.
Solana Pay allows you to accept payments quickly and cheaply directly in USDC or other stablecoins. Eliminating the need for fiat bridges radically increases network efficiency and reduces costs.
However, Solana Pay's key advantage lies precisely in the approach used to build the system architecture. Instead of a single application, the development team created a standard for writing applications and deploying points of sale (POS). Moreover, deploying a POS is extremely simple and requires no more than half an hour.
The Solana Pay ecosystem already includes dozens of applications, including Ottr Finance and Decaf wallets and specialized e-commerce solutions such as:
- Coinable,
- Helio,
- Parallax.
In addition, Solana Pay is already integrated into Shopify, Worldlin, and Stripe platforms and with e-money systems like MoneyGram. Visa's integration with the Solana blockchain in the spring of 2024 was also essential.
Given all of the above, it's unsurprising that the Solana Pay ecosystem has become one of the fastest-growing crypto-payments markets. However, one cannot help but note the presence of factors restraining its growth.
The main one is the much greater popularity of blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Many of Solana Pay's target audience are not crypto-enthusiasts and know nothing about Solana. Still, the general public associates the concept of "cryptocurrency" with Bitcoin and, to a lesser extent, Ethereum, and people are primarily looking for solutions for them.
Solana Pay and the SOL rate
Solana (SOL) has become hardly the most successful digital currency of the last few years. Since the second half of 2023, Solana has been showing steady growth. Moreover, the coin grew even during periods of correction in the crypto market as a whole, and the last phase of its explosive growth began even before Donald Trump's election as President of the United States — before all other major cryptocurrencies.
As of mid-January 2025, SOL is trading at around $215 and has over $104 billion capitalization. By this metric, Solana ranks fifth in CoinMarketCap's rankings.
It cannot be said that Solana owes this success exclusively to Solana Pay — the rapid growth of the asset began almost a year and a half after the launch of the payment system. However, the correlation of the SOL rate with the developers' "payment" successes is undoubted.
The activation of SOL growth in the second half of 2023 correlates with the record growth of activity in Solana Pay. Starting in March 2024, the growth phase coincides with the integration of Visa and the Solana blockchain.
Solana Pay outlook
Solana Pay is evolving faster than any other cryptocurrency payment framework for e-commerce. Moreover, this framework has become one of the primary growth drivers for the Solana blockchain and has generated tens of billions of dollars in capitalization.
Suppose the Solana Pay ecosystem maintains its trend of outperforming competitors in the next year or two. In that case, it has every chance of becoming the de facto global standard for accepting crypto payments. Moreover, it has already demonstrated that it is much less dependent on the cryptocurrency market conditions in general than most competitors. So Solana Pay deserves the closest attention, especially from those involved in online commerce.