On the basis of the data received from Google Trends, since the last months of 2017, bitcoin (and then also blockchain architecture), have taken the leading position among the requests of Internet users. People from all over the world want to know what “blockchain” and “bitcoin” is, while most of them are interested in how to make money on it.
We can safely say that today cryptocurrency enjoys the maximum popularity. According to Google Trends, in 2017 this topic got the highest score. Bitcoin and blockchain are also popular in a Russian-language segment, as a Russian search engine Yandex reports that (in one moth) 2.7 million users search for “bitcoin”, while the term “bitcoin” accounts for 200.000 requests.
At that, people are not just interested in cryptocurrency and related technologies. They also start to enter into our everyday life. The banking system is particularly affected by the market changes. Standard banking networks are replaced by fully online-banks, while the traditional banks with a long history start to master Internet. This area is focused on the improvement and simplification of payment processing. From year to year, they become easier and faster, as a high speed of transaction increases the amount of money trail (which means that the banks have a larger profit).
Different payment systems develop as well, which do everything possible to make the clients spend more and faster (sometimes even shouldering a consumer society). To date, it is obvious that blockchain technologies already affect and will keep affecting the existing payment systems and instruments. While at a time when Internet just started to develop, it all took at least a decade, in the modern age of blockchains, the pace is accelerating, and several years are enough.
No one doubts that the payment systems we’re using now will be either fundamentally changed or destroyed by the blockchains. In the next 5-10 years, everything we now consider right and imprescriptibly can be changed dramatically. It must be understood that the most popular modern payment systems (such as SEPA or SWIFT) have their cornerstones –mediators acting as regulators. All this slows down the direct financial movements, which must be moved both from continent to continent and within countries.
We are now witnessing the emergence of a whole new format of transactions. At that, the first swallow of these changes appeared at the turn of 2017 and 2018: we mean xVia, as well as the other technologies, such as XRapid and RippleNet – xCurrent. Such a scenario was predicted 5-6 years ago. With the emergence of different kinds of cryptocurrencies and the platforms they can be exchanged on, people got the opportunity to make the financial transactions quickly and easily with low transaction costs.
It took three years to create the instant payment system SCT Inst. During that time, some revolutionary events took place in the world of cryptocurrency, for example: the penetration of blockchain in Internet of Things, increase of capitalization on cryptocurrency market, emergence of distributed applications and the launch of smart-contracts. Therefore, it is quite natural that in future the cross-border payment systems will be based on the blockchain technologies. It can be Stellar, Ripple or other, a whole new token.
