Given the advent of Bitcoin, the payments sector is blockchain’s most famous use case. The payments industry has often been accused of being slow, inefficient, and costly, especially when it comes to cross-border payments.
The use of blockchain technology takes a step towards addressing these issues. Projects involving blockchain look to facilitate, faster, better, cheaper, more efficient and secure payments at a fraction of the cost using a distributed ledger.
The technologies innate properties allow for there to be a digitised AML / KYC process which reduced the change of there being fraudulent activity but equally speeds up the verification process. There is also the possibility enabling regulatory oversight and the auditing of transactions.
There have however been a number of concerns around the use of blockchain technology for payments. Initially with unfortunate and perhaps unfair examples where it had been used for illicit purposes such as Silk Road, but then also more general concerns around its security and its ability to scale and provide a resilient payments system.
The payments use case has also expanded to applications such as stablecoins and central bank digital currencies.