A look at HandCash recent Anypay team-up and 2.1.3 update

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HandCash has implemented Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer protocol, BIP 270, with Anypay—the Bitcoin service provider that makes it easy for merchants and consumers to use Bitcoin in commerce. This is the second major company that HandCash wallet users can transact with P2P; HandCash’s first implementation of BIP 270 was with Money Button back in March.

This new relationship allows HandCash users to transact with retailers—like the 250+ retailers that you can pay in Bitcoin SV (BSV) via HandCash on egifter.com—in a way that is safer, faster, and more efficient. The implementation also introduces significant benefits for merchants as well. Let’s take a closer look at the benefits HandCash users and Anypay merchants will experience thanks to the two companies’ collaboration.

Peer-to-Peer BIP270
@AnypayInc @handcashapp pic.twitter.com/I1icwyAC3D

— Pineapple Owl (@eyeone) April 29, 2020

The benefits for consumers

P2P payments introduce a number of benefits to both consumers and merchants.

“[From a user (consumer) standpoint]: there will be no delays between actually making the payment and it being deemed as accepted; virtually no potential errors that would in other conditions lead them to contact support for the wallet, the payment processor, or the merchant itself; and more businesses will feel comfortable accepting payments this way as they don’t have to wait for confirmations anymore, regardless of the amount – so more places to shop,” said Alex Agut, CEO of HandCash.

When payments are settled nearly instantaneously, more merchants feel confident in accepting that payment method. A problem that digital assets have had in the past, is that payment settlement could take upwards of one hour. This leaves plenty of time for errors to occur. But in a P2P system, merchants receive their money as soon as a customer completes checkout, leaving virtually no time for an error to occur that would prevent the funds from reaching the merchant’s wallet.

The benefits for merchants

Merchants also experience a significant amount of benefits from the P2P implementation. According to Agut:

“Merchants see much cheaper operating costs, thanks to not having to run and maintain a full node at all, regardless of the size of your business.

“P2P allows payment processors to be non-custodial, so they don’t have to withhold any money at any point to operate. This saves them, on an international scale, hundreds of thousands of dollars just in licenses as money transmitters and custodial services. It also saves them from a lot of bureaucracy. 

“Merchants have more flexibility in the kinds of payments and business models they can offer, as the payment itself is dynamically generated for each payment request with an updated ruleset, requirements, and transaction templates (inputs, outputs..). So you can have, for the first time, in just one QR scan, a restaurant payment that pays the restaurant, splits tips among the staff, pays the sales tax directly to the government, the transaction processor fee, the payment processor fee, a stablecoin exchange service, and even pay off some automatic royalty deals the owner might have. Everybody involved can get paid instantly for every payment. The possibilities are limitless now!

“And this new payment scheme is still compatible with QR codes, Bluetooth, NFC and any other kind of payment form they might want, and the cool thing about this is their customers won’t have to learn anything new. Just scan and pay, tap and pay or touch and pay.” 

P2P implementation lowers the cost of doing business for merchants working through Anypay because the platform no longer has to run a full node scanning the entire blockchain for transactions that might pertain to their merchants.

Instead, they get notified directly when a HandCash transaction is for them. It also saves businesses significant amounts of money because they no longer need money transmitter licenses or to pay for custodial services. In addition customizable QR codes and payment links that simplify the payment process make payment of every party involved seamless, like in Agut’s restaurant example above.

According to Agut, QR codes and payment links can lead to unprecedented innovation:

[QR codes and payments links open the door to] All kinds of new business models, incredible gains in performance, less code to maintain from their [merchant] side, much lower expenses, less licenses to apply for, tokenized payments… basically P2P transactions unleash all the power of Bitcoin by decoupling its growth from the transaction processing network.

HandCash 2.1.3

The recent implementation of P2P between Handcash and Anypay arrives on the heels of HandCash versions 2.1.2 and 2.1.3. Handcash’s 2.1.2 upgrade improved biometric lock, overall performance, and error message for HandCash users.

“We have made Biometrics Lock more stable in every platform, plus we are now obfuscating the preview image of the app when it’s in the background for security purposes: so nobody can see your Recovery Phrase, your balance, or your transactions before entering the app,” Agut said.

“We have improved the mathematical operations that manage transaction signing and other Cloud queries to make the app work faster and smoother. Error messages were also improved, being much more specific about why something has failed. Every day we have less errors, but when you have so many moving parts, you have to be transparent and informative to your users about what’s going on. Trust is imperative when dealing with people’s money!”

Handcash’s 2.1.3 update fixed create account issue affecting some users, fixed send to address pasted from clipboard, re-enabled screenshots in Android, and improved support.