According to a recent announcement, Pareteum Corporation, a mobile Cloud Communications Platform company, has completed development in order to add support of Blockchain technology to its billing and settlement services. This new service capability is designed to enable Pareteum customers to participate in the “Digital Economy Monetization to the Cloud” and accept and process Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Airtokens and other forms of cryptocurrencies.
According to Coinschedule, $287 million of cryptocurrency transactions or 7.8 percent of ICOs involved payments in 2017. This evolution began in 2016, noted Coinschedule, within the mobile payment industry with more than half of mobile users making a mobile payment, and it has continued in 2017 with the market expanding to $60 billion in mobile payments. Perhaps the biggest disrupter may be the technology behind digital currency. Blockchain has been noted as the potential foundation for building a new generation of transactional applications that establish trust and transparency while streaming business processes, which is critical to advancing adoption of mobile payments among consumers and businesses.
“The demand in the mobile market for digital wallet applications has quickly morphed into a requirement to process and settle all forms of currency and an entire eco-system of applications relying on purely digital settlement has emerged,” said Vic Bozzo, CEO, Pareteum. “It's a natural requirement of any Mobile Platform provider to support this move as many mobile applications become reliant on mainstream digital currency and other applications begin to create their own."
This new feature for use by any of Pareteum's Global Mobility Cloud customers will allow them to not only accept the cryptocurrencies but also to perform payment processing and settlements with their partners in any currency. For example, in the case of Smart Cities in emerging markets, creation of their own local cryptocurrencies is now a reality, facilitating primary economic benefit with the cities for their citizens. Last year, Pareteum announced a partnership with Airfox to integrate their advertising subsidy platform into the Application Exchange and Developer's Platform exchange based on the requirement for advertising to subsidize the costs of growing data service usage. Since then subsidies have gone beyond advertising and into micro-loans and cryptocurrency as the mobile phone penetrates more of daily life.
“We have sold solutions that take us, through our cloud services, into Smart Cities and cryptocurrency payment capabilities,” said Hal Turner, Executive Chairman and Principal Executive Officer, Pareteum. “It's not hard to imagine that we can live in an entire digital universe where all of our transactions may be managed through your own personal mobile phone, with secure identity management and digital payments. In thinking about this scenario, where essentially your mobile phone is your bank, without bricks and mortar, it's possible that throughout the day you may have earned enough digital currency through your transactions to be rewarded with that coffee or snack or phone minute or that extra megabyte of data. We envision a time in the not too distant future when Pareteum could create its own currency payments and settlements among the millions of subscribers on its platform globally. As we consider the new global mobile landscape, and Pareteum's service and capabilities developments in 2017, which have opened doors for us in the Internet of Things (IoT), Smart Cities, and use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Leaning (ML) creating predicative analytics for the vast amounts of digital data we are capable of securely processing, we maintain an optimistic view towards 2018 and beyond.”
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Edited by
Ken Briodagh
