"Small Business Owners to Receive Payments Immediately" ... Toss and KOMSCO's Experiment

[Financial News] Toss (operated by Viva Republica) announced on the 18th that it had completed a proof of concept (PoC) for blockchain-based public payment infrastructure with the Korea Minting and Security Printing (KOMSCO). Applying the system to actual payment sites is expected to shorten merchants' settlement cycles. 
The verification was a follow-up to a strategic memorandum of understanding (MOU) the two organizations signed in April. It confirmed whether existing public payment infrastructure could be connected to blockchain-based digital currency.
The organizations built a separate test environment for local love gift certificates, isolated from the live service. They then implemented the entire payment and settlement process, from loading gift-certificate tokens with blockchain-based digital currency to making payments and settling funds with merchants. Rather than examining only selected functions, they validated the user journey from start to finish.
The blockchain infrastructure was based on Optimism, an Ethereum Layer 2 ecosystem. Layer 2 processes transactions on top of Ethereum and records only the results on Ethereum, helping overcome the speed and cost limitations of conventional blockchains.
The organizations also assessed the level of transaction-information protection. Because transaction details on public blockchains can be exposed externally, they applied Privacy Boost to determine whether such exposure could be prevented.
However, the verification focused on preserving the existing payment infrastructure's processes and operating structure rather than creating an entirely new payment method. It was intended to determine whether blockchain-based digital currency could be added as another means of payment and settlement on top of that infrastructure.
In conventional payments, it takes several days from when a consumer makes a payment until a merchant receives the funds. Under the system tested this time, payment and settlement were processed together as a single transaction, and a procedure was also implemented to allow merchants to transfer the funds whenever they wished. Toss explained that applying the system could enable small business owners to secure sales proceeds sooner and reduce settlement costs.
A Toss official said, "Because public payment infrastructure is a service used every day, its stability and protection of personal information must be verified first," adding, "On the premise of regulatory compliance, we will continue to validate payment and settlement infrastructure that can ease the burden on small business owners."

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