The decentralised financial infrastructure ecosystem has seen a rapid growth in protocols for stable coins, decentralised money markets and exchanges, among many others, but there has been no efficient way to run trust-less recurring payments with cryptocurrency, until now.
Recurring payments are the backbone of SaaS models and are a necessary component of any financial infrastructure. However, traditional solutions in the fiat ecosystem are ubiquitous but have a number of inherent problems:
- They are expensive from a service providers’ perspective: credit card transaction fees regularly exceed 4%.
- They are fragmented from an end users perspective: There is no easy way to track, cancel or change recurring monthly payments, since each payment is managed separately with the individual service provider.
To solve these problems, Simon Dingle, Stephen Young and Bronwyn Williams, have developed Clockwork, as a complete decentralised, crypto-native, recurring payments solution.
It’s quite a tech trio, with Simon Dingle involved in the early development of BitX (now Luno) and numerous FinTech startups. Stephen Young served as COO at Coindirect in Cape Town up until June 2019. While Bronwyn Williams has gained FinTech experience consulting for Flux Trends as a “future of economics” trend analyst.
Clockwork is a decentralised protocol that enables recurring cryptocurrency payments and gives users the ability to manage repeat payments entirely on-chain. In this way, Clockwork enables the use of cryptocurrency for subscription, SaaS, and other repeat-payment business models that have not been possible before.
The Clockwork protocol enables decentralised repeat payments by incentivising the execution of recurring transactions while keeping all payment schedule information on chain.
As such, Clockwork allows:
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- SaaS service providers to accept recurring crypto payments, at much lower fees than traditional solutions, without having to build custom software.
- Gives end-users control of all their subscriptions in a single place.
The Clockwork team have written an in-depth whitepaper outlining the technicals of the protocol, explaining its native token, and illustrating the protocol structure. Built on the Ethereum platform, and making use of Maker DAO’s DAI token to avoid volatility common in cryptocurrency, Clockwork could be a significant opportunity for crypto adoption. With SaaS bundles and digital service subscriptions becoming increasingly popular, such a mechanism could very well find traction in the digital landscape.
To find out more about how Clockwork works, visit Clockwork.money to read the white paper, or send a mail to admin@clockwork.money
Image by Amber Avalona from Pixabay
