Last checked at 26 Aug 2020 07:00
26 August 2020
Blue Star Capital plc
("Blue Star" or the "Company")
SatoshiPay Investment Update
Blue Star Capital plc (AIM: BLU), the investing company with a focus on esports, payments, technology and its applications within media and gaming, is pleased to provide the following update regarding its investee company SatoshiPay.
SatoshiPay has today noted that it has reached a major milestone in establishing its blockchain-based clearing platform as a new standard for cross-border payments. As of August 2020, SatoshiPay has processed over €1 million in payments for its publishing clients.
During 2019 and 2020, SatoshiPay's strategic partners in the publishing industry, Axel Springer and Börsenmedien, supported SatoshiPay as a payment method in a number of campaigns which made parts of publishers' subscription content available via micropayments or instant premium passes.
Axel Springer offered sponsored access to their real-time incident mapping service Tatorte, part of the German newspaper Bild. SatoshiPay's platform managed instant payments between users and Axel Springer which saw spikes of several thousand payments per hour during peak periods.
Börsenmedien's leading German retail investor magazine Der Aktionär offers premium content to its subscribers. Visitors to Der Aktionär's online portal were given the option to pay for premium articles instead of entering into a subscription using SatoshiPay. Der Aktionär's paywall page features a SatoshiPay button that allows users to pay and continue reading with just one click. The premium article appears within seconds and without page reload. Integrating SatoshiPay's instant payments creates a win-win for publisher and user: Publishers receive an additional tool for monetising web traffic, potentially expanding their subscriber base and users can conveniently try out the premium experience by making micropayments.
The Stellar Development Foundation has supported SatoshiPay's content partners through free credits for SatoshiPay users, supplied in Stellar Lumens, the native currency of the Stellar blockchain. This allows an easy start for users, generates initial micropayment revenues for publishers and demonstrates one of the major advantages of the decentralized Stellar network: near-instant and extremely low-cost payments - settled within 5 seconds for a fraction of a cent in transaction costs.
SatoshiPay has seen purchases for publishing content being made from almost all countries within the European Union and from numerous other regions globally. Independent of a user's country of origin, payments arrived at the publishers' accounts within seconds, with fees and affiliate share already deducted. VAT is redirected to separate blockchain accounts simultaneously, resolving a large accounting and manual payment processing burden for publishers.
SatoshiPay has thousands of individual payments from almost any type of device or geography which has helped SatoshiPay finetune their technology stack to make it very scalable for future use cases. One such use case is SatoshiPay B2B, their upcoming cross-border money transfer service for businesses.
SatoshiPay B2B uses the same payment backend that has been developed and successfully used for the publishing micropayments service. It is expected that a public Beta version of SatoshiPay B2B will be available later this year.
Meinhard Benn, CEO at SatoshiPay explains:
"While processing payments for our publishers, we realised that many of the businesses selling content were very excited about the fact that funds arrived at their accounts within seconds, no matter where on the globe the payment originated from. Business owners asked us if they could use our technology to receive larger payments, and not just for online sales. So, we went ahead, found additional demand and built what people asked us for."
Blue Star currently owns 27.7% of the SatoshiPay's share capital.
Tony Fabrizi, CEO of Blue Star commented:
"SatoshiPay's payments infrastructure is growing and is about to enter an important phase with the upcoming launch of its B2B cross border payments solution. Having successfully raised money earlier this year the company is in a strong financial position and well placed to exploit this sizeable opportunity."
This announcement contains inside information for the purposes of Article 7 of EU Regulation 596/2014.
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About Blue Star Capital
Blue Star is an investing company with a focus on new technologies. Blue Star's investments include a 27.7% holding in SatoshiPay, a payments business using blockchain technology; investments in 6 early stage esports companies with shareholdings ranging from 11% to 18% and a 0.9% investment in Sthaler, an identity and payments technology business which enables a consumer to identify themselves and pay using just their finger.