A Risk Redistribution Standard for Practical Cryptocurrency Payment

Abstract

Cryptocurrencies are developed as a decentralized and trustless payment system, in which participants should be able to conduct payments across borders with acceptable latency. However, the fluctuation of the exchange rate between crypto and fiat currencies has raised significant concerns and thwarted the prevalence of cryptocurrency payment adoption. Existing solutions require merchants to liquidate the received cryptocurrency on an exchange platform. To compensate for the exchange rate risk, merchants tend to charge a higher price in cryptocurrencies compare to in fiat currency, which dampens the incentive of customers to choose cryptocurrencies as the means of payment. This paper proposes an architecture bolstered by smart contracts to transfer the risk from the merchants to the cryptocurrency issuer. This narrows the gap between prices denominated in cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies, and thus increases the adoption of cryptocurrencies as a payment method. The Ethereum blockchain is chosen as the experimental environment in this work, yet the architecture can be migrated to other decentralized systems without additional efforts. This work devises a novel ERC^1 standard to resolve the payment at a predetermined exchange rate that can be employed by any existing cryptocurrency. Immutable events on the blockchain will be generated upon the issuance and settlement of a payment, which are considered as the receipts for granting rights to the merchants to settle the payment at a regular basis. The architecture demonstrates a notable reduction on the exchange rate risk for the merchants, solving the primary problem of cryptocurrency payment adoptions nowadays.