Binance Adds Merchant Features to Early Version of Payments Platform

The Binance exchange is adding new features for merchants to its cryptocurrency payments platform following a beta release in February.

• Binance Pay now allows businesses to process payments in crypto, online or in-person, via QR codes and a dedicated API, the company said in a blog post Friday.
• The beta version, which was for peer-to-peer payments only, drew a claimed 250,000 users.
• The Pay platform supports more than 30 cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, ether, dogecoin and BNB, as well as five fiat currencies: the Australian dollar, Brazilian real, euro, U.K. pound and Turkish lira.
• Founder and CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao previously described payments as the "most obvious use case for crypto."
• With Binance Pay charging no fees, CZ said Friday, “Traditional payment infrastructure services are riddled with high transaction fees; we see this Pay product as a way to solve one of the many issues and limitations of traditional finance."
• Binance's first merchant client on the platform is Travala, a travel-booking platform that already uses its own cryptocurrency.
• Merchant payments services like this generally allow businesses to automatically convert their crypto to fiat at the time of a transaction to counter price volatility.
• However, a Binance spokesperson told CoinDesk that with Pay, "Merchants can manage the payouts by moving their balances to the Binance spot wallet and cashing out using their preferred banking channel."

See also: Luxury US Hotel Group Now Accepts Bitcoin, Dogecoin and Other Cryptos