Merchants

Apart from the problems that merchants face as users too, some problems faced uniquely during the merchant business, especially on centralized platforms are:

Problems

a. Data Protection - Business requires a considerable degree of privacy especially during transaction and investment processing. Businesses are worried about platforms attempting to interpret the company’s identity, business category, transaction behaviors, - and process them into marketing campaigns or worse, traded outside the platform leading to untraceable spams and privacy breach.

b. Control on the Fund - Fund control gets even more crucial for merchants where wallet amounts would be very high compared to personal users and hence the higher risk from a hacking/malfunction/mis-accounting mishap that can occur at the central system, and also that merchants must have access to manage their payables of crypto towards vendors. Staff compensation and bonus etc.

c. One place for all action - Merchants are able to collect the amount but to utilize a part of it for other financial purpose, they have to transfer the crypto to other platforms, resulting in inconvenience of handling different platforms alongside heavy transaction fees for simply fund management.

d. Manage Treasury - As crypto assets are collected, portfolio management of it such as holding in different wallets (just like the sweep in banking), re-investments in different earning vehicles, as well as off-ramp (liquidity into fiat); should be seamless.

e. Competitive to Fiat POS - Present day merchants are receiving fiat settlements through payment gateways and POS devices at earliest by next day, alongside merchant fees per transaction and merchant equipment purchase/rent cost for POS, and integration and periodic fees for payment gateways.

Solution

Through DeFi protocol UNIGATE operates end-to-end under,

a. Data Privacy - Business Identity is not a signup or requirement. Hence the concerns of data usage for analytical, marketing, commercial leverages or even internal usage by UNIGATE will not arise.

b. All-in-one: Merchants are given the privilege to access both Merchant and Personal Services - hence UNIGATE makes it a platform to enable collection, store collection in custody of customer and also support in earnings of the same collections through trading, staking

c. Immediate collection & settlement - Product supports immediate collection of crypto, and immediate liquidation to fiat

d. Mass Payments - UNIGATE provides the facility for bulk payments to unlimited wallets as beneficiaries, all in a single csv file for upload and processing. Used cases depends completely upon merchant’s use; eg. incentives to employees, commissions to channel partners, payments to vendors etc

e. Decentralized platform for Merchant - Every aspect of UNIGATE is DeFi, and this is highly crucial for merchants. The invoice creation facility also runs on IPFS protocol.

f. Manage Treasury - UNIGATE strives to be not just a collection mechanism but a platform of crypto portfolio management - where cross-chain crypto asset migration,liquidation, bulk payouts, trading, reinvestments for earning mechanisms

Additionally,

Invoicing in IPFS - IPFS is the decentralized protocol for file storage (as blockchain is for cryptocurrency) - and merchants can generate invoices & receipts to their end customers for the goods/services being dealt in return for crypto.

If the merchant has an online presence, UNIGATE provides both eCommerce plugins and RESTful APIs for a plug-and-play integration