Dropp, powered by Hedera Hashgraph, is the world’s first affordable micropayments platform built to enable pricing flexibility and drive growth. Merchants can adopt revenue models previously not attainable, save money, and grow their business. Consumers receive convenient access to products and services in an ad-hoc manner while at the same time preserving their privacy by making purchases instantly and privately in HBAR, USD, and USDC without signup or disclosing their personal information.

A microcosm of a challenge faced by public distributed ledger technologies today

Merchants selling digital goods and services brought about in the internet era have had to adapt to legacy payment models and potentially missing out on growth and revenue opportunities. The promise of public distributed ledger technologies has been for anyone online to transfer value in novel ways but, as many have found, with limitations. These constraints manifested in alternative networks as unpredictable and costly fees, slow settlement times, and poor transaction throughput, which hindered the user experience and made it economically impossible to facilitate true micropayments.

“The concept of micropayments has been around since the late ’90s but in the last couple of years, significant growth in the digital economy, consumer needs and technology maturity have made micropayments feasible both in terms of technology and economics,” said Sushil Prabhu, Dropp CEO and Chairman.

Dropp’s challenge was finding a public distributed ledger with unmatched performance, security, stability, and low, predictable fees to power their micropayments offering. Combining these benefits was especially critical to ensure that micropayments in cryptocurrency and stablecoins were possible for merchants attempting to use the Dropp platform as their payment provider of choice.

Latency and throughput are essential for micropayments. Dropp’s expectations of consumer behavior are that they would make a high volume of micropurchases on an ad-hoc basis, primarily for instant consumption. Speed and throughput play an integral role in the end-user experience.

Economic and technologically feasible micropayments with an easy-to-use interface

Hedera Hashgraph went above and beyond other public networks by offering the exact capabilities of which Dropp required — an extremely fast, secure, transparent, and cost-effective ledger on which to build a micropayment platform. “Using Hedera as our distributed ledger reduces our technology footprint making us very cost-effective," said Dropp CEO and Chairman Sushil Prabhu. In addition, its governing body of large, global organizations and no-fork guarantee ensured a stable platform for decades to come.

A low and predictable transaction cost structure, combined with high-throughput and fast settlement times, was a critical driving factor for Dropp. A cost-effective transaction model to enable micropayments for small value transactions was a must — and with transaction fees for stablecoins and HBAR cryptocurrency costing a predictable $0.001 USD, the Dropp team recognized this as a significant reason for adopting Hedera. Not only that but transaction throughput exceeding 10k/second and settlement in the range of 3 - 5 seconds, making the decision to choose Hedera Hashgraph a cinch.

“Businesses need cost-effective payment options without having to pay cost-prohibitive merchant fees for transactions less than $5 USD. With Dropp, consumers can gain access, for example, to a single movie without having to pay a full subscription, or a start-up could get access to an expensive cloud data service and only pay-per-use.”

New business models open a world of possibilities for merchants and consumers

As merchants unbundle their services and offerings to create affordability for consumers, it ultimately increases consumer participation and inclusiveness in the digital economy. With the introduction of an actual micropayment business model, merchants are no longer restricted by the two legacy models adhered to today: subscriptions and advertising.

Merchants can package and price their services in various new ways, including pay-per-use, micro-subscriptions, and more. Dropp also offers ways for merchants to grow virally through an in-built “Referral Fee” feature, enabling merchants to provide instant referrals to customers.

Consumers reap the benefits of this business model through affordability and instantaneous access without sign-up; the anticipated result is an increased likelihood for users to make purchases and participate due to the additional data privacy. Transaction amounts are transparent, with the IDs of each user obfuscated — the consumer is in complete control of how much data is shared with the merchant.