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2022-05-05
By Az
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Get Free Solana NFTs With Your Coffee – Solana Pay Transaction Requests Are Live On Phantom And Solflare

Something very interesting is taking place today at Atlas Cafe in San Francisco’s Mission District. The Solana Pay team are taking over the cafe, in order to showcase their app’s latest update – Solana Pay transaction requests.

Solana Pay transaction requests enable two way interactions between merchants and consumers, whilst bringing the power of on-chain transactions to the off-chain world.

For the duration of their three months of existence, developers and merchants have been able to utilise simple, one-way transactions of both fungible and non-fungible tokens.

So how does it work?

Let’s use a fictional scenario to understand it better. Imagine a customer walks into a cafe and wants to buy a coffee. The merchant accepts Solana Pay, and they have a dedicated QR code for the coffee the customer wants. The customer simply needs to scan the QR code offered by the merchant, and in turn their wallet posts a request message to the merchant’s server, which contains the customer’s wallet address public key. The merchant receives the message and responds with a unique transaction request. The wallet receives this, and the customer can then see the transaction details, and decide whether to approve or decline the transaction.

If approved, the customer signs the request with their private key, and the transaction gets sent to the Solana Blockchain. The merchant explains this to the customer who has Solana Pay on their phone. But even though the customer understands that the transaction fees on the Solana network are minuscule, they are still a bit concerned that they have to pay the extra gas to buy the coffee.

But merchants can opt to pay for the transaction fees.

The merchant explains that he has set it up to cover the transaction costs, and the customer goes ahead and scans the QR code. So now the customer has his coffee, the merchant has his money, and the network transactions rise, pointing to increased growth and adoption.

Due to this being the blockchain, various additional things can take place during this transaction. Like for example the merchant automatically minting an NFT for the customer.

Just when the customer thought that was that, they realise an NFT has appeared in their wallet. The merchant explains that this NFT acts as a type of loyalty scheme. By simply holding it in their wallet, next time the customer buys a coffee at this cafe, they will receive a discount. The NFT can either be kept for these discounts, or be sold on the secondary NFT market to someone who is a more regular caffeine junkie, and would benefit more from holding it.

On top of this, each time they make a purchase with this NFT in their wallet, they also receive custom tokens – created by the merchant – which act as a loyalty points that can be spent in store.

The customer takes all this in, along with their coffee, and head home to start coding ASAP!

More than just buying a coffee

In their announcement, the Solana Pay team mention more use cases such as:

“Composable DeFi transactions involving borrowing, swaps, escrow, privacy, and more, can occur at the point of sale, enabling refunds, chargebacks, insurance, buy-now-pay-later, discounts, rewards, and yield generation.”

Solana Pay transaction requests are already live and available for developers and merchants to use, with Phantom and Solflare supporting them so far.

And as for the NFT minting we mentioned, mtnPay’s Booth app already does this, by minting a unique one-of-one NFT for their customers during the transaction.

If you want to see Solana Pay in action, here it is, being utilised by mtnPay’s app:

As for the Atlas cafe takeover, just like in our example, everyone who checks out with Solana Pay will automatically receive an NFT loyalty token, that can be utilised for discounts on future purchases at Atlas Cafe.


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Az

Author and blockchain enthusiast.

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