Payments platform Worldpay reported that it processed $1.3 billion in stablecoin payments so far this year, compared to $1 billion for the whole of 2023. That’s still a tiny proportion of the $2.3 trillion in processes annually. During 2022 Worldpay started allowing merchants to receive their funds from Worldpay using the USDC stablecoin.
The company is exploring operating validator nodes on various blockchains. That’s according to Sanchit Mall, the web3 and crypto lead for the company in the Asia-Pacific, talking to Bloomberg.
Bloomberg claimed this would be the first time the company will become a blockchain validator.
However, over the years we’ve reported Worldpay’s involvement in at least three public DLTs where the company was an active participant operating nodes.
The first was Korea’s Klaytn blockchain in 2020. In 2021 it joined the governing council of the Hedera Hashgraph DLT, where the council members operate the consensus nodes. And in 2022 we reported it would operate a validator node on the Crypto.org blockchain, now known as Cronos POS. It’s still active with Hedera and Cronos, although we’re not sure regarding Klaytn, which became more decentralized and this year merged with Japan’s LINE blockchain Finschia to become Kaia.
Meanwhile, a few large firms operate nodes on several blockchains. Asset manager Franklin Templeton finds it helps to get more familiar with the tokens and their utility of the particular chains. Deutsche Telekom sees the operation of nodes as a national extension of its role as a telecoms firm. And Google does it to provide hosting solutions and a repository of data for querying blockchain transactions using BigQuery.
