Elrond Acquires Web3-Based Payments Startup Utrust

Ethereum-killer Elrond, capable of processing 10,000 transactions per second, has announced the acquisition of Utrust, a Portugal-based cryptocurrency payments firm. The terms of the deal remain unknown but will be updated early this year from a token-holder’s perspective. By acquiring Utrust, Elrond intends to offer instant settlement solutions for merchants and revolutionize the e-commerce and payments industry. Specific goals include making payments faster and more reliable and introducing a new blockchain and DeFi-based staking called Merchant Yield. Commenting on the development, Elrond Network CEO Beniamin Mincu, said: “At their best, payments should happen near-instantly, globally, and at a trivial cost. Enabling this for merchants worldwide is our primary goal. The second product we will be working on together with the newest member of the Elrond family is Merchant Yield, a DeFi-first payment processing solution that will provide yield for merchants, instead of requiring them to pay a percentage of the transacted value. The implications are hard to overstate.” Currently, payment processors charge merchants anywhere between 3 to 11 percent with a slow settlement time. Elrond aims to solve this by increasing the speed of settlement along with decreased costs related to receiving payments. Furthermore, the latest Merchant Yield offers a game-changing scalable revenue for Web3-based businesses by transforming crypto proces...