HIPS Payment Group Ltd., the Irish e-commerce and mobile payment solutions firm, has partnered with Vourity, a Swedish firm, to roll out crypto payments across 50,000 electric vehicle (EV) charging stations in Europe.
It has been reported that the partnership of crypto payments with charging stations will occur over the next three years starting from November 2021.
However, the firms haven’t revealed which cryptocurrencies will be supported yet, but Vourity has dropped a pretty strong hint that Ethereum is likely to be among the first after it released an image of a payment terminal with an ETH logo on it. Ethereum is moving to the much more energy-efficient Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism in the next year, which could mitigate any backlash among environmentally conscious EV drivers.
Hans Nottehed, the CEO of Vourity, said:
“We are currently evaluating what cryptos/coins we will support. It will be converted to fiat.”
The report said that crypto payments will be integrated with Vourity’s EV charging stations by connecting to the blockchain through Hips Merchant Protocol’s native protocol token Merchant Token. Back in May, HIPS Payment Group launched the HIPS Merchant Protocol, the HIPS Merchant Protocol Gateway, and its governing Merchant Token. The protocol was built on Ethereum and Solana in May 2021 and plans to expand support to Cardano in the future.
HIPS noted:
“With near real-time transaction speeds, in addition, the Hips Merchant Blockchain is designed for merchant transactions regardless if they are mobile, instore or e-commerce and utilizes the interchange concept from the payment card industry.”
Tesla famously did a U-turn on accepting Bitcoin (BTC) payments for vehicles, with Elon Musk noting that the firm will not change course until the mining sector is at least 50% powered by clean energy.
Thus, other EV-focused firms have sought ways to innovate using “clean” crypto mining and adoption.
Source: Cointelegraph