PumaPay aims to change the paradigm of crypto payments. The way crypto in general works, and that is by design, is described as a ‘push payment’. What does this mean? It means if I want to send you Bitcoin, I will send Bitcoin from my wallet to your wallet. I need to ‘push’ the payment. There is no way for you to ‘pull’ the payment from my wallet.

This works well for small one-time purchases, but businesses in general want to have pull capability. For example, Netflix ‘pulls’ payment via the credit card on file each month, without any interference from you at all. Imagine if you had to log in every month and click on ‘Send’ to send money to Netflix if there was no way for the company to take money directly.

The push vs. pull paradigms have undergone lots of debate in the crypto community. However, from a merchant point of view, it is clear – they would rather have pull payments than push payments.

PumaPay and Merchant Flexibility

If Crypto is to truly become a global payment means, it will need to adopt to certain existing payment paradigms. PumaPay offers that bridge. PumaPay is a set of smart contracts that let merchants pull payments from your wallet, instead of you pushing payment from your wallet. Obviously, the first transaction is subject to your approval.

For example, say you have a Netflix or Netflix like subscription that you want to pay with crypto. You don’t want to have to remember to make a transaction each month to pay the service or face disruption. Instead, you decide to use PumaPay with the explicit understanding that you want to continue paying for this service. You are still in control – if the payment fails, the service ends. However, you’ve now removed the friction from this process.

This mechanism makes it easy for merchants to go all in on crypto adoption.

Even more interestingly, PumaPay and its payment protocols are not limited by current transaction modes. Remember, we are dealing with smart contract here, which means you can encode fairly complex logic in your payment process. This flexibility is what may ultimately attract larger merchants towards crypto payments. It is because you can do things with smart contracts that you cannot do otherwise in normal debit-card like transactions.

PumaPay Platform and Token

Along with the set of smart contract suite discussed above, PumaPay comes with its own Software Development Kit (SDK) and API for merchants to integrate PumaPay into their existing payment and billing solutions. On the consumer side, there is a PumaPay wallet application.

The payments and the economy created here run on the PumaPay native token, called the PMA token. This is the token used for conducting commerce between the end user and the merchant. If you’re a merchant, you can convert the PMA tokens into local fiat or BTC or ETH through regular channels, or just hold on to the PMA tokens.

If you’re interested to learn more about PumaPay, check out their website and read the whitepaper. It is undergoing its token sale at the moment as well.