Powering Invoice Settlement on the Blockchain With Regulated Digital Currency

Monerium Case Study

Many developers look to programmable decentralized platforms like Ethereum to build new financial products and services that remove friction for the end customer, decrease the cost of trade and increase access to credit. To deliver on these customer promises, FinTech applications like Monerium utilize smart contracts on the Ethereum network to store all the critical information necessary to manage a complex digital currency. These applications must be able to interact with those contracts by accessing and changing the information stored inside and are live 24/7. This means they require an ‘always on’ connection to networks like Ethereum.

We caught up with Gisli Kristjansson, co-founder and CTO of Monerium to learn more about the Monerium-Tradeshift collaboration to enable instant invoice settlement on the blockchain with regulated e-money - and why they chose Infura for their infrastructure needs.

Can you introduce Monerium, for those who aren’t familiar with the company?

Kristjansson: At Monerium, we believe that money should be accessible, secure and simple to transact. That is why we are bringing regulated fiat currency to the blockchain, where everything of value will be stored and transacted. Our customers are European businesses (specifically SMEs) but we'll be expanding into other jurisdictions and opening up our product to consumers over the next few years.

You partnered with Tradeshift to enable their customers to settle invoices on the blockchain using Monerium-issued e-money. Can you tell us more about that project?

Kristjansson: The goal of the project was to demonstrate the viability of using blockchains for real-world use cases. We wanted to demonstrate that it was possible to issue digital invoices for products and services, and settle them online without going through traditional payment intermediaries. Supply chain innovation partners like Tradeshift have the ability to create products and services where the entire flow of money becomes an if-then-else statement in their program logic. By partnering with Tradeshift, we could enable their customers to issue invoices on the blockchain, and settle them instantly using e-money issued by Monerium.

What drew you to Infura as the infrastructure solution for this project?

Kristjansson: Monerium has developed a cloud hosted issuance managing platform for e-money, essentially bridging traditional payment flows and blockchains. For this project, we needed a reliable connection to Ethereum to enable us to scale the supply of digital currency to reflect our customer holdings. Building reliable, production-grade infrastructure in-house would have required specialized knowledge and resources that we just didn’t have. Infura provided us with a standardized interface to Ethereum. That meant that we didn’t have to worry about the operation of blockchain nodes. Instead, we could focus all our attention and resources on building our product.

To see what other developers are building on Infura, head to our customers page and check out more stories from killer applications like MakerDAO, Lucidity, OpenZeppelin and Aragon.

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