Bitcoin Global News (BGN)
June 12, 2018 -- ADVFN Crypto NewsWire -- Up until now, making
small payments as well as small transfers with Crypto hasn’t
actually been cheap or viable on a large scale. Blockchain
endeavors like Stellar have been looking to solve this problem, but
up to this point, they haven’t been able to justify eliminating
transaction fees.
One major argument for this lack of
justification is that there would be no incentive at all, to keep
them running. One of the prime examples in support of this, that is
usually mentioned is that no transaction fees means no miners.
Another major argument in support of this is that without
transaction fees, the security of a Blockchain
network suffers.
According to an article from Coin
Desk that came out on Monday, a South African Blockchain
company called Wala has found the answer that
Stellar and more popular Cryptocurrencies have not.
Using a technological framework
that is defined as Microraiden, Wala is apparently
able to avoid having high transaction fees as well as any major
latency like the Ethereum network frequently
experiences.
If you’re not exactly clear on what
Microraiden is, it is essentially a simplified version of
the Raiden network, which is a Blockchain that’s built on
top of the Ethereum network, in order to cut the costs of all
transactions on the network that involve its native currency as
well as ERC20 tokens.
Apparently, with the Raiden
network, it was too difficult for decentralized app developers to
create simple, recurring payment channels for their
customers.
Overall, the purpose of the
creation of the Microraiden network was to make what are called
micro-transactions, worthwhile.
For example, in the case of Wala,
one of the biggest use cases is facilitating micropayments related
to an average citizen’s cell phone bill, in Africa.
Coin Desk claimed that Wala’s
actual, current usage numbers were revealed exclusively to
them.
From the beginning of this year up
to now, Wala seems to have reached an average of 6,300 transactions
each day as well as 57,000 user accounts, or user wallets.
According to the same report, most of these daily transactions are
for under $1, which is again, what the Microraiden network was
designed to facilitate.
As is also suggested by Coin Desk,
these usage numbers do show that the Blockchain can help people who
are living in developing countries. What is not quite accurate is
that the report claims that this one example proves that
Cryptocurrencies work better for people in developing
countries.
In this case, the jury is still
out. What could prove this to be true is Wala being adopted at a
larger scale or Wala inspiring an existing, more powerful
network like Stellar to work towards attracting a
very large number of users, for the same use case.
In addition to all of this, Wala
isn’t currently using the existing technologies of local banks to
bring about industry partnerships, through which its services could
be connected to customer bank accounts.
Their explanation for this is that
because the local banks insisted on charging high fees when they
tried such partnerships, Wala determined that this particular path
wasn’t feasible.
The CEO of Wala added that their
aim has always been to enable zero-fee transactions, but because of
this failure with local banks, it doesn’t seem to have been
possible, up to now.
To make matters even more confusing, Wala advertises being a
zero-fee network, on their main website.
At this time, Wala is succeeding
because it has a large user base that trusts their services, but
their major roadblock will be how to scale further. Can they find a
way to reach their zero fee dream model without the support of
local banks? Only time will tell.
By: BGN Editorial Staff
News:
Wala
Blockchain
Cryptocurrencies
ERC20
Tokens
MicroRaiden
Network