Despite the huge progress in crypto payments adoption worldwide, there is a problem undermining crypto's capability of being accepted by mainstream consumers.
In fact, since all crypto payments are final and can't be disputed, this has lead to a huge imbalance in favor of merchants. Every merchant will be able to receive his payment whether he has delivered the goods and services paid for by the consumer or not.
Nowadays, Hips Merchant Protocol (HMP) and the governance token Merchant Token (MTO) aim to solve this problem and build a healthier consumer-merchant balance.
What is the merchant token?
The merchant token and the merchant protocol intend to introduce consumer protection in the DeFI space from the traditional card payment industry. This token is an ERC-20 token issued on the Ethereum blockchain, but it will also be issued to any blockchain that supports smart contracts like Cardano and Solana.
What is HIPS Payment Group?
HIPS Payment Group (hips.com) is the company group behind the merchant protocol. It is a provider of innovative and cost-effective e-commerce and mobile payment solutions and processes to date payments for over 200,000 merchants globally. The company will leverage its long experience in the financial sector to secure mass adoption of the merchant token.
The merchant tokens tokenomics:
There is a maximum supply of 100,000,000 MTO tokens. The MTO ICO has 100 phases. With each phase completed, the token price increases by $0.01 and will reach $1.20 by the end of the ICO. The token price is currently $0.97 USD. The faster you buy, the more money you can make by selling/trading the token after its first exchange listing in August 2021 as stated in their roadmap.
How will consumer protection work?
The merchant protocol will protect the consumers using two mechanisms. The first is Payment Escrowing with Automatic Dispute Management (ADM):
In this procedure, a user approves a token transfer to the merchant via a Merchant Protocol Gateway(smart contract). Then, this gateway routes this transaction to another smart contract based on the time of the order which will hold the tokens in escrow. Now, the merchant needs to have a high reputation score(calculated based on his successful “non-disputed” escrows, age of address and total processed amount on address) in order to withdraw the escrowed tokens or after the escrow time has passed without any dispute-signals from the payer account.
You can have a more detailed overview of this mechanism and the second one:Payment Escrowing with Community Dispute Management (CDM) on the official website.
How to buy the merchant token?
Buying the merchant token is a very easy and straightforward process. All you need to do is to go to their website, sign up and pay with crypto, bank transfers or bank cards.
ressources:
https://static.hips.com/pdf/white_paper/merchant_token_white_paper.pdf