Invoicing (or Invoice processing) is a process to facilitate invoice creation, delivery to the payer and the payment settlement for the invoice. In a crypto world invoicing is one of the most growing and changing areas, since crypto have already been accepted as a payment method in several countries. Consequently a respective infrastructure have been developed in order to allow merchants and companies to pay with crypto and accept the payments.
Moreover many individuals across the world prefer crypto due to the fast payments, low transaction fees, no chargebacks and (the main thing) no excessive bank control. As a result crypto billing and crypto invoicing have grown into a considerably large industry with hundreds of companies providing their services.
How it works?
For a payer (a company or an individual) the crypto invoicing works in the following way: after the product / service is invoiced, a user gets an invoice with all the parameters, including the amount to be paid, wallet address and service description. Usually this document is wallet-readable, meaning that the invoice could be opened in the wallets that support this type of documents and instantly paid.
A payment service provider usually charges a certain fee for the transaction, which could be different for different solutions. After the payment is sent, the payment provider either transfers crypto in fiat and sends the funds to the payment recipient or the recipient gets the funds in crypto.
What solutions exist on the market?
There are plenty of payment service providers on the market. To mention few: BitPay, CryptoPay, Coinpayments. They vary in terms of commission fee, some of them also have credit card services, allowing their users to connect their crypto wallets to the prepaid debit cards and simply to shop with crypto.
- Although some of these solutions are quite advanced, they have a lot of drawbacks, such as:
- Centralized nature of the solutions;
- Shortcomings of the cryptocurrencies that are processed;
- Flexibility
Let us go in depth with each of the problems and find out how they could be solved with DEEX decentralized ecosystem.
Centralized or decentralized
When we say the solution is centralized, we mean that there is always a middleman between a merchant and a payer. Someone who takes control over funds and hypothetically could be a point of failure in the transaction chain.
The centralization in this case is a solution to avoid crypto volatility: If a merchant would just accept crypto, the price of the asset could be changed in just 5 minutes, so a company loses a certain percent of their profit, which could be business critical. That is why the crypto payment service providers take this risks working as a mere centralized crypto exchange – a bridge between a crypto wallet and a bank account.
However there could be a decentralized scenario which on one hand solves the volatility issues on another hand removes the middleman from the transaction case. DEEX is an ecosystem of decentralized financial solutions, such as decentralized exchange, voting system, auctions, cryptomat, etc.
Since we believe crypto has a decentralized nature we consider that the solutions for the industry have to be as decentralized as possible. DEEX Invoicing is a solution to process payments both in crypto and fiat.
Let’s say a merchant charges $100 for a product. A payer wants to pay in BTC. So using the DEEX exchange solution the funds are immediately transferred from BTC to bitUSD or any other stable coin. This saves the merchant from volatility. Than a merchant is free to either keep the funds in stablecoins or to convert the funds with the fiat / crypto gateway provided by DEEX exchange.
This solution is easy compared to other invoicing services, because it does not require any middleman to get involved in order to process crypto and fiat. The funds are simply processed by a decentralized exchange, which is the backbone of the invoicing solution.
Shortcomings of the cryptocurrencies that are processed
The most early invoicing solutions like BitPay are still working with Bitcoin only. Therefore BitPay is as slow as Bitcoin itself and a transaction can take more than an hour, especially if several counterparties are involved and more than one transaction has to happen before the payment is fulfilled.
This is not something that merchants are ready to accept. New solutions (like Coinpayments) claim that they support almost 1 500 different coins and tokens (!). On one hand this is good news in terms of transaction speed, on the other hand the thing is there are more Bitcoin holders in the world than of any altcoin. This means that the main issue is still not solved.
In case of DEEX and Bitshares as we mentioned earlier this issue is solved through using the system of gateways. Once a user pays in Bitcoin, it is converted into the synthetic asset called bitBTC which works as fast as the Bitshares network that is capable of processing up to thousands of transactions per second.
So in a nutshell the DEEX invoicing users are able both to use the most comfortable asset to pay with (BTC or any other crypto) and do it in a fast and secure way, thus not affecting the speed.
Flexibility
Let us go beyond crypto and imagine that someone wants to transfer fiat in a fast and anonymous way without going to banks, payment systems and without the crypto volatility issues. Imagine you live in China and want to send your CNY to your Russian friend so he gets the funds in RUB.
There is nothing simpler than that if you use DEEX payment solutions. You just convert your funds in bitCNY and than your counterparty gets them in bitRUB and converts through a local fiat gateway – for example Yandex or Qiwi that are working with DEEX.
DEEX Invoice
At the moment DEEX Invoice is a microservice that is embedded in several solutions within DEEX Ecosystem – Lottery and Voting.
Let us go through the DEEX Invoicing procedure on the example of DEEX Vote.
We already wrote about the DEEX voting procedure in our blog. As you remember, after a candidate is selected, a certain amount of DEEX has to be paid to the deposit address.
In case of DEEX Vote each listing candidate has its own address in a human-readable format: < deex-vote-…> as well as its unique QR code. The deposit account information and the amount to be paid could be seen in the Invoice (screenshot below):< /deex-vote-…>
So basically this is the format of DEEX Invoice, which could be used for any other use-cases and accepted by any merchants. After the Invoice is confirmed, the payer enters own DEEX account ID and respective private key, after which the invoice is paid.
Overall
DEEX Invoicing working on Bitshares protocol is the most relevant solution for crypto processing in terms of speed, flexibility and even fees. Since the solution is decentralized, a user pays only DEEX network fee without paying excessive percentage to a provider. This is an important thing when a large amount is converted.