Blockchain platform Zilliqa takes one step towards mainstream adoption

Public blockchain platform Zilliqa has teamed up with Singapore-based online payments service Xfers, which recently snagged an important e-wallet license in the country. Zilliqa announced the news today at Zilliqa Day, an event celebrating the company’s second anniversary.

The tie-up comes just after the launch of Zilliqa smart contracts earlier this month. Developers can now write and deploy smart contracts on the Zilliqa blockchain using the platform’s own smart contract language, Scilla.

Zilliqa CEO Xinshu Dong / Photo credit: Zilliqa

“This partnership really fits us well. Xfers wants to explore the use of blockchain for payments, and we want to venture into the fintech industry and see where and how blockchains can help decentralize finance in general for users,” says Amrit Kumar, president and chief scientific officer of Singapore-developed Zilliqa.

In an exclusive interview with Tech In Asia, Kumar said that Xfers is looking to build some of its fintech product and service ideas on a blockchain. As such, services like e-money and ecommerce payments, for example, will become more transparent and secure.

“I do think remittance will be a good use case for Xfers, and I’m looking forward to helping them with that,” says Kumar.

Xfers is the only fintech startup in Singapore to be licensed as a Widely Accepted Stored Value Facility (WASVF) by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). The license allows the company to act as a bridge between businesses and users who want access to financial services.

Think of WASVFs as akin to prepaid cards for MRT rides, mobile phone credit, or Starbucks purchases. The facility may be single-purpose – like the Starbucks card – or multipurpose. The latter lets you pay for goods and services other than those provided by the issuer – the way that Singapore consumers can use NETS FlashPay for convenience store buys.

In Singapore, Xfers Wallet is one of just five WASVFs approved by MAS. The others are EZ-Link Card, NETS CashCard, NETS FlashPay, and CapitaLand’s CapitaVoucher.

Xfers’ enterprise payment solutions include support for payments, disbursements, regulatory compliance, and a digital wallet. For this partnership, Xfers will be integrating the architecture of its payment infrastructure onto Zilliqa’s smart contract layer. This will allow for greater efficiencies in cost, transparency, and security.

Fixing a major limitation with blockchain

Zilliqa’s focus on high throughput makes its collaboration with Xfers – and indeed, the addition of smart contracts on its public blockchain platform – a potential game-changer in Southeast Asia’s payments landscape.

During initial tests on the testnet, Zilliqa achieved a throughput of 2,828 transactions per second (TPS), which would make it among the fastest blockchains in the world, if data from Cointelegraph is accurate.

“If you look at popular blockchains today, which are basically Bitcoin and Ethereum, the number of transactions they can process is around 10 to 15 per second. [That] means that within a second, if you receive say, 16 transactions, then the 16th transaction will have to wait for the next second to be processed,” explains Kumar.

Compare this with the throughput of popular credit card companies Visa and Mastercard, which is around 8,000 TPS – and even more during peak seasons, such as Christmas. Zilliqa wants to take on these traditional payment methods while offering lower processing fees.

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