The global payment processing solutions market is estimated at USD 47.61 billion in 2022, and projected to hit USD 139.90 billion by 2030, at a CAGR of 14.5%. Despite a booming industry, the businesses it supposedly serves are left with little profit, if any – some may even operate at a loss.
“When a foreign tourist uses a credit card issued in their home country to make a 10,000 yen purchase at a Japanese shop or restaurant, the credit card processing fee typically ranges between 1% and 3%, depending on the transaction volume. For simplicity, let’s consider a fee of 1.99% for a large-scale store, which would result in a 190 yen income for the card company. However, the issue arises with subsequent costs — Yamaoka explains that these companies must pay various fees, including about 10 yen for domestic system operations and 180 yen in interchange fees to the overseas card issuer. Additionally, they pay around 80 yen to international brands like Visa and Mastercard for the use of global settlement infrastructure. As a result, the card company ends up with a deficit of about 70 to 80 yen per transaction. This explains why the more foreign tourists use their cards, the deeper the losses for Japanese card companies.”
News on Japan
It’s a multi-billion dollar mega-market whose patrons deserve much better than the limited options they’re currently restricted to. And this is what GajuPay was created for.
GajuPay is a point-of-sale payment processor for merchants interacting with Gajus via GajuMobile. Through GajuPay, Gajumaru opens the door to transition the real global economy to operating on-chain.
It’s one of the tools we’ve lined up to bring the benefits of blockchain technology to real-world business – as in actual, real-life, practical use. GajuPay would enable shop owners to integrate digital payments with no upfront cost and minimal effort, and accept payments with lower operating costs, making it worthwhile for even small local cash-only businesses to, at the very least, give it a try.
Understanding Real-life Business Needs
So how do retailers work with blockchain? How is this achieved without requiring intermediation from Visa, Mastercard, an issuing bank, a receiving institution, a payment processor and all the other services that pile on fees? How does a peer-to-peer payment get reported into their business systems?
Despite how obvious it seems, nobody in ‘blockchain’ has ever seriously tackled the question: how does a shop actually accept on-chain payments?
Putting to one side the joke that nothing in ‘crypto’ masquerading as blockchain is serious, the moment you try to answer that question practically – by talking to actual shop owners – you immediately collide with problems that no blockchain project has explored:
How do you link a blockchain transaction to a real-world sales instance?
How do you handle two registers paying to the same business account?
How do you log the fiat-to-Gaju conversion rate (assuming that you are not operating in native Gajus) at the moment of sale, which is a legal reporting requirement in most jurisdictions?
How do you issue refunds when the cashier doesn’t control the disbursing account?
How do you prevent a malicious actor from logging out the cashier and logging in their own “shop” to steal funds?
These are not exotic edge cases. They smack you straight in the face the moment you move from “wouldn’t it be cool if shops accepted crypto” to “here’s how you actually do it.”
GajuPay is our solution.
Beyond Payments–Accounting and Compliance
Because GajuPay enables direct transactions without the need for multiple intermediaries in between, transaction fees are consistently lower than other digital payment solutions. That on its own warrants serious consideration by any business that accepts digital payments. But GajuPay goes beyond this basic proposition.
Built into the GajuPay system is an automated accounting, reporting, and data export utility which simplifies the problem of tracking Gaju payments in fiat denominations and vice versa – all of which assist with tax reporting and compliance for businesses.
Real-world accounting occurs off-chain – because the authorities to which businesses submit compliance requirements currently do not operate on-chain, but in traditional, or perhaps hybrid online-offline offices. And what they require is quite a handful of paperwork in the physical world.
A shop needs to track which sales session belongs to which cashier, route payments to the correct accounts, log exchange rates for tax compliance, match incoming transactions to specific sales instances, handle refunds through proper authorization chains, and export all of this in formats that accounting software and spreadsheets can interpret.
None of this is on-chain. The blockchain handles the payment. Everything else–the orchestration that makes payments useful to an actual business–requires backend infrastructure derived from deep domain expertise.
GajuPay provides that backend: payment facilitation and reporting software for on-chain commerce. It’s essentially what Stripe started as, before Stripe became a financial services conglomerate.
The Evolution Path
GajuPay follows the same evolution that made Stripe successful: start with the simplest possible integration, then expand as merchants grow.
Stage 1: Web Portal (MVP)
The vanilla version handles everything within a web page. The merchant signs up, we host their data, and the immediate problem is solved without them deploying anything. Basic features out of the box: sales tracking, transaction matching, exchange rate logging, receipt generation, accounting exports.
Free to get started, fees are levied on throughputs, no complicated service tiers, no arbitrary thresholds. It scales smoothly from a market stall doing ⽊50 per day to a retail chain doing ⽊50,000 per day.
A basic demonstration using a PinePhone (Linux mobile) is in development to showcase how lightweight this can be. Any device with a browser becomes a point-of-sale terminal.
The tradeoff is that their accounting data lives on our servers. For most small merchants, this is fine, actually preferable, since they don’t want to manage infrastructure. It won’t satisfy everyone – larger retailers will want to handle their own data, or at least, will want to evolve to that.
Stage 2: Webshop Integration
The point-of-sale use case is critical to proving the real-world utility of GajuPay as a service, but it only covers half of the commercial cases that vendors are faced with. The next step for GajuPay is to provide a set of plugins, remotely served widgets and framework tools for existing web shops to integrate with in a simple way.
It will also be very important to publish documentation for third party developers and independent operators with the requisite technical skills to perform their own integration with the GajuPay system within their web shop.
Stage 3: Self-Hosted Backend (SaaS Package)
For merchants who need their accounting data in their own hands, whether for compliance, privacy, or control, we will offer a self-hosted version. They run their own backend node and interface server.
This will require a more involved set-up and provide many more options for the retailers to implement that are specific to their needs – this is not a five-minute setup through a web portal as per the base offering. DNS configuration, server management, security responsibility, all shift to them meaning that other service providers are likely to be involved too.
Pricing will reflect this consultative element and the different support model they choose from us, but the base fee as a percentage of throughput will remain. For businesses with IT capability and regulatory requirements that demand data sovereignty, it’s the right answer.
Same features, same interface, different hosting model.
Why This Matters
Every feature merchants desperately need is also deeply annoying to implement.
Consider refunds.
You can’t just “send money back”, the cashier doesn’t control the disbursing account. Someone has to authorise the refund. That means refund queues: a mechanism for cashiers to request refunds that get approved by account holders. This distinction between “I need to refund this customer” and “I have authority to disburse from this account” is not obvious until you try to build it.
Consider security.
A phone or tablet sitting at the front of a shop is an attack surface. Keys on that device can be captured. A malicious cashier could switch the payment destination to their own account. A malicious customer could switch the screen while the cashier isn’t looking. A random person could log out the cashier and log a fake shop in. These attacks happen with existing point-of-sale systems.
GajuPay needs visual cues confirming the receiving account is legitimate, isolation of risk so compromising a front-of-shop device doesn’t compromise the business, and indirection of authorities so cashiers can operate without holding keys that could empty the business account.
Consider multi-register reconciliation.
If a shop has two registers but one receiving account, how does each cashier know which incoming transaction corresponds to their current sale? You can’t tell from the blockchain alone, you don’t know the sender’s address before receiving the transaction. The backend has to track expected transactions per register and match them as they arrive.
Addressing these problems are not optional to deliver a solution for retailers. Doing so makes the difference between an idea and a product.
GajuPay will deliver that.
Know of any businesses that can benefit from GajuPay?
GajuPay is set to launch this year in tandem with GajuMobile.
We would happily help onboard new businesses, and reward you for the referral!
We have an incentive system for people who help expand the Gajumaru ecosystem. Don’t hesitate to reach out–we’d love to hear from you. Send a message to partners@qpq.swiss
More information on GajuPay and other upcoming products will be published as we approach launch. You can also subscribe to the newsletter to stay updated on developments within the Gajumaru ecosystem.