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Blockchain Finance Financial Services Software

How to introduce cryptocurrency payments in an online payment gateway

Bitcoin cryptocurrency on circuit board graphic with sample texts, Vector illustrator

Cryptocurrency payments have become a popular topic in the past few years largely due to the rise of Bitcoin. In 2017, bitcoin reached its all-time high of about $20,000. Unsurprisingly, this invited the attention of investors from across the world. Statista reports that there are nearly 34 million active crypto-wallet users worldwide as of the third quarter of 2019. 

Because of increased awareness and use of digital currencies, many product and service providers are looking to tap into this small, but tech-savvy market. Fees on crypto payments are also often considerably lower than traditional payments processors. Here’s how to offer your customers crypto payments. 

Cryptocurrency payments

Cryptocurrency is a digital form of currency, a medium of the electronic exchange, which uses cryptography to carry safe transactions. First introduced in 2009, the technology runs on blockchain technology that acts as an auditing and clearing tool. In short, this prevents double spending and removes the need for centralized payment processors to verify funds and record transactions. Crypto payments offer immutability and transparency. 

Privacy-minded consumers are especially drawn to cryptocurrency so if you’re trying to entice this consumer segment, consider implementing cryptocurrency payments.

Most popular cryptos

Where the starting point of the cryptocurrency was bitcoin, there are several others to choose as well. Here is the list of most popular cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. Supporting one or more of these will give consumers more choice in how to pay.

  1. Bitcoin
  2. Ethereum (Ether)
  3. Ripple (XRP)
  4. Bitcoin Cash (BCH)
  5. EOS
  6. Cardano (ADA)
  7. Litecoin (LTC)
  8. Stellar (XLM)
  9. IOTA
  10. NEO

Why “big” payment processors don’t support crypto payments 

Big processors do not accept cryptocurrency payments because they charge high fees for carrying transactions. On one level, this makes sense because companies such as Visa have to maintain an enormous auditing apparatus and it costs money to it. On the other hand, they’ve also built monopolies that cater to big business. As a result, small and medium-sized businesses bear the brunt of fees.

KYC procedures for merchants that want to accept crypto

A strict KYC procedure needs to be followed to accept cryptocurrency payments. Often referred to as a complicated process, it requires the essential records and personal details of the merchants. 

Step 1: 

The initial step involves the verification of the mobile number of the applicant. For a bitcoin exchange, you will receive a code on the registered number in the applicant’s name. You will receive a code on the same number, which will be required to complete the identity verification process.

Step 2:

The second step involves providing personal details. A copy of all the personal details needs to be submitted. It depends upon the type of platform being used to carry the transactions, according to which documents for identity verification are asked. Some of the personal documents required include driver’s license, scan of an ID, recent utility bill, birth certificate, or maybe a passport. It does not require any bank mediators as the traditional payment methods do. 

The requirement of documents varies depending upon the kind of transactions or according to the amount you are planning to trade. 

If you think the process requires a lot of hustle, then you can also rope in third parties to do the task for you. Nowadays, various third parties and financial institutions provide the services of a mediator that can help get the merchants to get KYC, hassle-free. 

Processing cryptocurrency payments through the payment gateway

The crypto payment gateways give the merchants the facility to make and accept payments in bitcoins. There are multiple processors currently available in the market available that allow bitcoin transactions. 

With the blockchain platforms, you can immediately receive and make payment and convert it into fiat money in no time. It simply makes the whole process super convenient and swift.

Coinbase

For the best bitcoin global exchange experience, Coinbase is the most trusted name. It boasts of being the largest bitcoin exchange in the U.S.A. Coinbase has a massive user base as it offers some fantastic features to its users. One trusted name for instant cryptocurrency conversion into fiat money. It completes the bitcoin exchange requirement for big and small businesses alike and takes only 2-3 days to clear the transactions. The exchange is free and prompts 1% transaction fees only after the initial $1 million transactions have been carried out. 

Coingate

The best thing about the user-friendly application is that it supports near around 40 cryptocurrencies. With the single application, merchants can single-handedly at a point of time make payments using different currencies and methods. Coingate charges a nominal 1% fee on transactions, which is quite reasonable. 

BitPay

Its presence in the market since 2011 makes it one trusted name in the Bitcoin world. Based out of the U.S., it facilitates accepting bitcoin as payment. The two-factor authentication provided by the app makes it a secure and trusted source to carry transactions. You can make daily transactions worth $1,000 and annual transactions worth $10,000, beyond which it levies 1% transaction fees. The app supports numerous currencies; from the Chinese Yuan, Euro, Pound Sterling, U.S. dollar, and direct bank deposits. 

GoCoin

Loved by the developer globally, it offers basic, straightforward API, which makes the transactions super secure. Various plugins available on GoCoin makes it compatible for use on multiple online shopping platforms. The payout is made in dollars, and they charge a 1% fee on transactions. 

CoinPayment

You search for the low fees crypto payment gateway ends at CoinPayment. It charges only 0.50% transaction fees for accepting 1,270 altcoins. It currently serves around 2,45,000 vendors in more than 180 different countries. You get access to various shopping cart plugins for some of the famous e-commerce stores like Magento, Opencart, Drupal Commerce, Shopify. 

Settlement of crypto transactions 

It usually takes around 10-20 minutes for a Bitcoin transaction to confirm. These scalability challenges still hamper some adoption. However, using a different crypto to accept payments is one option. Some cryptocurrencies take very little time to settle. Stellar on the other hand, takes much less time to clear, somewhere around a few minutes. 

Nearly around 3-5 bank working days, the amount gets reflected in the bank account of a merchant. Unlike the traditional payment options, the cryptocurrency transactions are irreversible.

However, this is not a matter worth worrying as there are mechanisms to help cases with legitimate complaints and refund requests. Thanks to crypto technology, wallets securely store details of the merchant’s wallet on a distributed ledger. In case there is a need, all the transaction records can be scrutinized and viewed publicly. 

Cryptocurrency is the future as it is an increasingly useful option of making transactions and carrying secure businesses and exchange, across the globe. 

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Blockchain Entrepreneurship Financial Services Software

CoinTracking's success: real-time cryptocurrency tracking and reporting

Turning a hobby into a business? CoinTracking founder and CEO, Dario Kachel, knows exactly how to do it.

Since 2011 cryptocurrency trading has been CoinTracking founder Dario Kachel’s passion. What started as an excel sheet for him to keep track of the price of bitcoin, struck a need in the market and has since grown into a vital resource for many crypto traders. Here’s how he turned it into a successful business.

Kachel’s entrance into the world of cryptocurrency trading began in 2011 after he read about the new asset class in a newspaper. What started as a personal hobby soon morphed into a profitable business.

“At the end of 2011, I read about [Bitcoin] in a newspaper and thought that it sounded interesting,” Kachel recalled. 

He decided to buy his own coins and started trading soon afterward.

“Really quickly, I got lost and I actually tracked everything in Excel. But the manual tracking [in Excel] wasn’t really satisfying. So, I started to search for some kind of automated tracking tool, sure that something like this exists already,” said Kachel. 

But it didn’t. This is when the idea for CoinTracking was born.

Kachel is an experienced developer by trade and started to write a simple script at the end of 2012. It automatically imported new transactions from exchanges and updated the prices for several cryptocurrencies.

“One day,” he beamed, “I was attending the bitcoin meetup in Munich and we started to talk about this script — people actually wanted to use it!”

Inspired and spurred on by the community, Kachel began to design a user interface for the new app. Thanks to a user post on Reddit, more and more people signed up. This kind of traffic was getting out of hand.

“At one point,” he said, “the number reached 5000 new users per day. It was overwhelming and I figured that I could not handle all of this as a side project.” 

With the increasing popularity of bitcoins in 2017, Kachel started to turn his hobby into a business. He left his job, hired support staff and built a team of developers to help him do it.

Visualization cointracking
CoinTracking analyzes your trades and generates real-time reports on profit and loss, the value of your coins realized and unrealized gains, reports for taxes and much more. 

One issue that Kachel faced was a lack of skilled developers with cryptocurrency experience. “It is really not that easy to find good people in Germany with this kind of cryptocurrency knowledge. I wasn’t really convinced of outsourcing. But I am very happy with Espeo.”

Besides adding a subscription system for auto-payments for corporate users and introducing new languages and tools, such as Amazon SQS and KMS and Go language, we transcribed the code for the mobile application and added new functions. Read the detailed case study here.

The team has implemented several features since the initial launch — users can even get help with their tax statements and Kachel plans many new features and options to meet the emerging needs of users of all levels. 

“There are many criteria users should be aware of when starting trading with cryptocurrencies,” said Kachel, “and we help them not only with keeping track of their trades but also support them with the paperwork which comes along.”

If you’d like to know what criteria are important for choosing a cryptocurrency trading platform, check out CoinTracking’s newest blog post Cryptocurrency Exchange Exports: the Ultimate Guide.

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Blockchain Software Technology

6 software technologies that will dominate 2020

6 software technologies that will dominate 2020

2019 is rapidly coming to an end. It’s time to sum up this year’s achievements and to look ahead. Narrow Artificial intelligence, mixed reality, and distributed cloud are just a few of the tech innovations to watch as we enter the next decade. Here’s a brief summary of Gartner’s 2020 tech trends report combined with our software development experts’ predictions for which software technologies will dominate the 2020s.

Check out: IT trends for 2022 according to our experts

6 software technologies that will dominate 2020

Table of contents:

  1. Multiexperience
  2. Digital twins technology driven by IoT
  3. Distributed cloud
  4. Event-Driven Applications
  5. Blockchain
  6. Progressive web Apps

1. Multiexperience 

Improvements in wearables and advanced computer sensors are paving the way for the emergence of multiexperience, fully-immersive technology. Traditional ideas of the computer will expand to include new, varied touchpoints. This, of course, will greatly increase the demand for mobile development as firms rush to compete on better, more immersive apps.

Gartner cites Domino’s Pizza, who rolled out an ordering app that combines autonomous vehicles, smart speaker communications, and tracking sensors. The growing popularity of wearable technology is driving development in this field. Greater connectivity and improved user experience will attract more users.

Currently, multiexperience apps use augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality to deliver ever more immersive experiences. As consumers demand more and more sophisticated applications, businesses will have to keep up and deliver more ambient experiences.

digital twins

Time and time again companies have trusted us as a software development provider. Read more about some of our projects and find out why.

 

2. Digital twins technology driven by IoT

Internet of things is an area where the so-called digital twins concept evolves fastest. Modern household appliances use a lot of smart components equipped with sensors to gather data about real-time status, working conditions, and alerts. They’re integrated to cloud-based systems to gather data, then process and analyze it.

And here’s how a digital twin is created. It’s a kind of pairing appliance which reflects its real-life counterpart in the digital environment. This virtual model of a product or service allows for the analysis of a huge amount of varied data. In effect, we can deal with problems before they even occur, prevent downtime, develop new functionalities and much more.

The digital twin concept has the widest coverage in such projects as smart cities, real-time navigable models, or health care  – with virtualization of hospital systems for work safety and continuity.

As web & mobile developers, we can also observe that digital twin technology is spreading to the user experience field. Service providers try to get clients to attend their events, for example trades or fashion shows and let customers build their visual twin to become a part of an event. This way they create an extraordinary user experience.

augmented reality
 

3. Distributed cloud

Distributed cloud systems promise to bring about a new era of cloud computing. These systems distribute public cloud services to several locations outside a provider’s data centers, but the provider still controls them. Cloud providers take care of cloud service architecture, governance, operations, updates, and delivery.

Since data centers can be anywhere, latency and data sovereignty challenges are reduced. Distributed cloud services offer the benefit of a public cloud service with those of a private cloud.

event driven appa
 

 4. Event-Driven Applications

Gartner predicts that through the 2020s a real-time, event-based approach will be a core required demand for 80% of all digital solutions. It’s crucial for business application development companies to apply “event thinking” to their solution strategy.

Event programming is not a type of technology or programming language. It represents an approach that should be implemented in a product development process. An event-driven application responds to actions generated by the user or the system, for example, mouse clicks or loading a program. From a programming point of view, it’s important to separate event-processing logic from the rest of the coding work.

Technologies like AI or IoT speed up event-driven coding as a useful product development strategy. In general, event-driven apps can improve responsiveness, flexibility and give a better understanding of user experience.

blockchain
 

5. Blockchain

2017 was the year of blockchain hype. Now that the hype has died down, it’s time for practical blockchian applications. Gartner was hesitant in its predictions for blockchain but stressed that in specific cases, firms can leverage blockchain technology to improve internal processes and ensure data security. 

Find out more: Espeo Blockchain – blockchain services that can address different business problems

Blockchain is a network of interconnected peer-to-peer devices. This technology provides for the absence of central databases, as well as the lack of clearly defined locations where all data is stored. Use cases here are especially useful to the supply chain and real estate asset management sectors as well as in healthcare data management. Throughout the 2020s, advanced in blockchain technology will improve its usability and enterprise applications. 

software technologies
 

6. Progressive web Apps

We have to add progressive web applications to Gartner’s software technologies. The growth of web-based solutions is a solid trend we could observe during the current year. It’s no reason to think it’s going to change in the coming decade.

On the contrary, in the long term, it’s more probable that web apps will take a significant slice of market cake from mobile apps, and not vice versa. We believe it, even more, when we hear Google reps talking about focusing on expanding the features of the current browsers to let web applications achieve the same UX level as mobile apps.

Moreover, progressive web apps are easier to develop and maintain than native applications. They combine the best features of the web and mobile apps. What’s more, they make use of the vast web ecosystem, plugins, and community.

See also:

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Entrepreneurship Newsroom Software

Espeo Software Oy officially opens in Helsinki, deepening our commitment to the Finnish market

Espeo Software Oy officially opens in Helsinki, deepening our commitment to the Finnish market

Espeo Software has opened a local LLC in Finland to better serve our long-time clients there and to make it easier than ever to work with us. With more than thirty Finnish clients under our belts, the Nordic country has been among our most valued markets for over a decade. Our local team now has fewer hurdles to jump to work with our Finnish partners. It’s where Espeo was born and we’re returning to our roots. 

Eleven years ago, founders, Paweł and Sylwia Rogowicz launched Espeo Software after studying in Finland and working in several Finnish software houses. They saw an opportunity to connect Polish developers with the urgent IT demands of Finnish startups and enterprises. The work culture they experienced there — one that prizes direct communication and flat management structure continues to influence Espeo everywhere we’re now present. 
 
Since those early days, Finland has continued to be a major market for Espeo Software and our opening of a local LLC only deepens our commitment to delivering pragmatic digital solutions to Finnish companies in the payments, healthcare, educational technology, and media sectors. This Finnish entity establishes a local technical presence and brings us closer in line with Finnish electronic invoicing while still delivering the same nearshore Polish development team we’ve done for the past eleven years.
 
Aki Inkeroinen, general manager of Espeo Software Oy pointed out that Finnish companies prefer a local presence in Finland partly to streamline invoicing and partly to be sure that IT partners meet their expectations. It sweetens the deal making working with Espeo more attractive. 
 
“The basic thing,” said Inkeroinen, “is that we can better serve the Finnish clients that we have and attract others. The key thing is that when we have a local company, we can better cooperate with local partners here in Finland but also we can have electronic invoicing. The expectation with Finnish clients is that we are able to comply with the normal Finnish working model.”
 
Petri Laaksonen, project manager for Finland coordinates tasks and serves as the point of contact between developers in Poland and Finnish clients. Our local technical presence ensures we meet our client’s standards.
 
“Finnish companies,” said Inkeroinen, “expect that we open a local company here. For their partnerships with software houses, they have partner morals and they expect the company is local. We have been working with Finnish customers for eleven years, but officially we have not been able to fulfill many of their partnership rules that require a local presence and local company, but now we fulfill this. Finnish companies prefer the ease of electronic invoicing that meets Finnish tax law to invoicing in other jurisdictions. It’s just one more step toward deeper cooperation here.” 
 
We’re pleased to be returning to our roots in Finland by opening a local LLC there while still connecting Polish tech talent with innovative Finnish firms.