Safe Cash, a San Francisco payments startup, claims its blockchain can process 25,000 transactions per second. That dwarfs Bitcoin's throughput by 3,000 times and surpasses Visa's average capacity by
Safe Cash, a San Francisco payments startup, claims its blockchain can process 25,000 transactions per second. That dwarfs Bitcoin's throughput by 3,000 times and surpasses Visa's average capacity by a factor of ten. Final settlement takes five seconds.
Chris Kitze, Safe Cash's founder and CEO, said his team spent 18 months tackling core technical challenges. "It is not trivial," he said. "We also have a clear technical path to increase this speed to 100,000 transactions per second later this year, well in advance of that kind of global demand."
Bitcoin doesn't meet Kitze's standards as a banking solution. The network's consensus mechanism takes too long. Its governance is murky. Price volatility makes it an unreliable platform for financial institutions. "It's not built to scale for massive adoption of instant e-commerce," Kitze said. "Bitcoin is not a reasonable solution for banks."
Safe Cash targets financial institutions and merchants with a suite of services built on blockchain technology. The platform offers white-label blockchains that banks can operate themselves, sidestepping the multi-day settlement windows of traditional networks like SWIFT. Banks can select from multi-currency wallets, separate settlement blockchains, or combinations of both, depending on their specific needs and regulatory environment. The tokenization system works within existing banking infrastructure to convert cash into digital form.
Safe Cash's appeal rests on a simple fact: cash still dominates global commerce. "Trillions of dollars are transacted in cash globally each year, representing 85% of all global consumer transactions," Kitze said. Rather than ask the world to embrace a new digital currency, Safe Cash takes something everyone already accepts, cash, and makes it digital.
Safe Cash, founded in 2014 in San Francisco, raised $1.2 million in September. The round included venture capital firms and fintech investors such as Bialla Ventures, Naveen Jain, Vuk Bulajic, and Vinh Vo. Jain founded InfoSpace before moving to venture capital.
