The First-ever BTM Payment in Real World – Instant and Cheaper for SeaRates Shipment
On 22 May 2010, a BTC fan named Laszlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas delivered by Papa John’s for 10,000 bitcoins. While being worth $30 at that time, Hanyecz pizzas would now cost more than $60mln at current bitcoin price. This thus kicks off cryptocurrency’s real-world use as a payment means.
Bytom (BTM), dedicated to bridging the atomic world and bit world with the aim of supporting the interaction of multiple assets, made its first real-world transaction yesterday, October 22 2018.
SeaRates, the world’s largest e-commerce shipping platform, takes the lead to adopt BTM as a payment and settlement tool. The company is the oldest resource dedicated to online logistics based in England, currently with over 600,000 registered users, 40,000 registered carriers and 250,000 shippers. Its site SeaRates.com and mobile apps offer users more than 8,980,000 varied shipping rates across 200 countries and regions around the world.
Comparing to other candidate cryptocurrencies, SeaRates finally seeks to adopt BTM to address such issues as exchange rate fluctuations and exchange costs in US dollar payment. It will also run transactions and check the operability and stability of smart contracts based on Bytom blockchain.
According to SeaRates, if users choose to make shipping payments by cryptocurrency, they are able to check balances and trade history, print and receive freight bills, and most importantly, payments would be completed in seconds. A two-week test of the Cryptocurrency Bytom and crypto wallet on SeaRates showed that Bytom digital payment takes only 0.3 seconds. In addition, there was no loss of value in the overall freight after several USD exchanges with BTM, as BTM will be closely connected with the exchange rates of US dollar, Japanese yen or euro. SeaRates said it would later work with banks in Malta and Swiss to set up built-in exchanges for real-time crypto-fiat exchange, which would effectively rule out any possible speculation operations.
As per logistics information, the bulk garment shipment, from China heading to Korea by sea, has been successfully delivered and received; the whole process cost only 74BTM ($0.23 per BTM as of press time) in total, roughly $17, far less than payment with US dollar under the same circumstance.
As SeaRates site shows, BTM has been the only cryptocurrency that it supports in its online shipping payment, which would enable instant payments for shipping anywhere in the world. In the future, the platform will push hard to implement cryptocurrency payment.
Apart from BTM adoption, SeaRates said it would have in-depth cooperation with Bytom in terms of smart contract. It also announced the first 10 transactions paid in BTM would have a 10% discount (no more than $10,000 per transaction) in an effort to encourage crypto payment in shipping. As of press time, the 2nd transaction using BTM payment is well in progress.
It marks BTM as a digital asset has started circulating in the real world. Currently global logistics of bulk commodity mainly depends on shipping by sea, of which the price is relatively low but it takes long time, during which shipping cost may increase along with the volatile exchange rate. A report in 2016 by a chief economist at Natixis shows, 10% reductions in railway, air and maritime costs would increase trade by 2%, 5.5% and 1.1%, respectively. Adopting BTM payment will effectively avoid the exchange cost arising from exchange rate fluctuations and might even be an effective force for the growth of international trade in the future.
