Email is a popular technique in part because it does not matter which service you use. A Gmail user can send a message to Yahoo! account and vice versa. However, when it comes to sending cash online, the services don’t work. A Venmo user cannot send money to someone who uses Cash App or Zelle, and cannot use a bank’s website to send money to those apps.
This is why a new service called PayID is difficult. PayID is launched by an alliance led by Ripple, a cryptocurrency company, that provides consumers with the equivalent of an email address: a unique, easy-to-read ID that works with any service provider.
The reality, unsurprisingly, is a bit more complicated.
Ripple has dozens of partners, including Bitcoin wallet provider BitPay and a privacy-focused browser called Brave, but none of them have an everyday name like Venmo, which means PayID, for now, just one more Paid silos and one is dark. .
But the service has the opportunity to grow, as its underlying code is open source, which means that anyone can develop it. In practice, this means that companies like PayPal or Square could integrate PayID into their platforms, or even offer it to their customers.
According to Ripple executive Ethan Beard, PayID is designed in a similar way to the Internet domain name system, which takes the string of numbers that define a website address and represents them as an everyday phrase.
Although the PayID system seems relatively simple for consumers and businesses to use, there are competitive reasons why payment companies may be reluctant to adopt it. That is, a payment protocol that works across all platforms could undermine your ability to make money with a captive user base.
Beard, however, believes that payment providers like Square or Venmo may eventually adopt PayID based on a different competitive calculation, meaning that doing so could be a hedge against Libra, Facebook’s ambitious plan to create a new one. global monetary platform.
Beard also says that common sense advocates a universal payment identification system. He notes that technology like email and text messaging does not restrict users to a particular company and argues that payments should not be different.
