A leading Australian debit card network is using Hedera Hashgraph to trial a micropayments system that could rival traditional online methods.
In an exclusive press statement shared with CoinDesk on Wednesday, Eftpos Australia CEO Stephen Benton said the collaboration between the two companies is a key part of Eftpos’ digital payments strategy.
Eftpos is Australia’s major debit card payments system having clocked more than 2 billion transactions in 2019, worth around AU$130 billion (US$92.8 billion).
The strategy is attempting to showcase the use of micropayments for online goods and services including pay-per-page content and streaming platforms on a pay-per-second model.
Benton also said Eftpos would “test the capability” of an Australian digital stablecoin leveraged off the Hedera Consensus Service API.
Read more: Australia Post Now Lets Customers Pay for Bitcoin at Over 3,500 Outlets
The project will be led by Eftpos entrepreneur-in-residence Robert Allen who will focus on payments innovation.
Allen said the proof-of-concept would assist Eftpos in exploring more use cases for distributed ledger technology by leveraging “next-generation payments infrastructure” that may be able to “support Australian dollar-based micropayments.”
Hedera welcomes the collaboration especially since its native token HBAR fell flat of expectations on initial release in September 2019, dropping from a high of $0.36 cents to around $0.03 in a little over two weeks.
HBAR has since steadied itself and is up 1.34% over a 24-hour period to around $0.04, according to crypto data analytics firm Messari.