Payment Startup Xfers Teams Up With Zilliqa To Integrate Blockchain, Smart Contracts

Xfers processes credit card transactions and internet bank transfers. The partnership will add Zilliqa's smart contracts to Xfers' suite of services, including payment collection, automated payouts, compliance tools, and digital wallets. Both companies expect the blockchain integration to reduce costs and increase security.

"Our vision at Xfers has always been to create the trusted, digital financial ecosystem in Southeast Asia," said Tianwei Liu, CEO and co-founder of Xfers. "With a population of over 600 million, the Southeast Asian market remains predominantly unbanked with over 70% of citizens without access to basic financial services. By partnering with Zilliqa, we hope to provide a cutting-edge solution that grants equal opportunities and cost-saving solutions for digital businesses looking to set-up in the region."

Xfers processed over $260 million in transactions across Singapore and Indonesia during 2018. The company, founded in 2014, operates an online platform where merchants collect payments, integrate checkout systems, and automate disbursements to vendors and contractors. Y Combinator included Xfers in its summer 2015 class. Backers include Challenger, Quest Ventures, 500 Startups, Golden Gate Ventures, and angel investor Eduardo Saverin. The company serves peer-to-peer lenders Tunaikita and Julo, along with Payfazz, an agent-based financial platform in Indonesia.

Zilliqa built its blockchain platform to handle the transaction volume that Visa and MasterCard process. Founded in 2016 by computing faculty from the National University of Singapore, the startup uses sharding to achieve scale. Sharding partitions the network into smaller component networks that operate in parallel, allowing transactions to be processed across multiple networks at once rather than one at a time. With 10,000 nodes, Zilliqa claims the platform would reach the average transaction rate of Visa and MasterCard. To date, the network has processed 2,828 transactions per second.