Why the Internet Needs Native Payments (And How Shardeum Will Power It)

Vision: Make decentralization accessible to everyone
Mission: Power peer-to-peer payments
Industry Segment: PayFi

The Internet Needs Native Payments Infrastructure

Satoshi launched Bitcoin to enable peer-to-peer payments. While this vision introduced crypto to the world, its real-world application as a payment system has faced practical limitations. Bitcoin evolved into a store of value, a role it fulfills remarkably well. But the original goal of building a decentralized payment system at scale remains incomplete.

Shardeum is built to bring that vision to life. We’ve developed an autoscaling blockchain that can increase capacity based on real-time demand. This ensures that transaction fees stay under a cent, even as hundreds of millions of users join the network.

Shardeum is also EVM-compatible, integrating seamlessly with the growing Ethereum ecosystem. Unlike most EVM chains that focus on DeFi, Shardeum is targeting PayFi, a sector with real world applicability and massive scale. Ripple and Stellar have laid some groundwork in PayFi, but both are focused on B2B and lack consumer-first solutions. And neither supports EVM, which limits their developer adoption. Shardeum fills this critical gap by combining PayFi with EVM compatibility.

Why PayFi?

DeFi caters to a niche audience of traders. It has volume, but not mass appeal. Your grandma is not using DeFi.

Payments, on the other hand, are for everyone. They’re the gateway to mass adoption. Let’s face it: banking is getting more restrictive and less user-friendly. As the world becomes increasingly digital, especially for younger generations, there’s little reason to expect them to rely on outdated banking systems. They value privacy, speed, and global access. Just as a generation skipped desktops and moved straight to mobile, the current generation will skip traditional banking and adopt crypto-native payment systems.

To make that possible, we must build. Solving payments is our responsibility to the future. If we can fix payments using blockchain, we will unlock Web3 for billions. Everyone interacts with payments in some form—making this a truly global opportunity.

Solving Payments: Our Strategy

Payments is a massive space. We aim to tackle it step-by-step, letting the community, developers, and early adopters shape our roadmap. Thanks to Shardeum’s high scalability and ultra-low fees, we are uniquely positioned to lead here.

Payments Categories

1. Macro Payment Use Cases

• Remittances: Cross-border transfers are slow, expensive, and often exclude the unbanked. Crypto-native solutions can drastically reduce costs and improve access.
• E-commerce payments: High fees still plague online transactions. Blockchain-based payments can enhance trust and reduce overhead.
• Payroll: Paying global teams is difficult, delayed, and full of middlemen. Smart contract-based disbursements can bring automation and transparency.
• Institutional settlements: Settlement cycles in traditional finance take days. Crypto can enable near-instant finality.
• Trade finance: Paper-heavy and opaque. Decentralized platforms can provide traceability and reduce delays.
• Real-world assets (RWA): Liquidity and transferability of real-world assets are limited. Tokenization combined with efficient payment layers can unlock value.
• Crowdfunding: Centralized platforms take high cuts and can censor projects. Crypto rails offer global access and censorship resistance.
• Donations: Traditional platforms often charge 3–5% for global donations and lack crypto-native support. Scalable, borderless crypto rails solve both.

2. Micro Payment Use Cases

• Traditionally underserved due to transaction fees
• Huge potential with the rise of AI agents

As AI becomes more autonomous, agents will need wallets and the ability to pay each other for services. The old SaaS model won’t work for occasional or compute-heavy tasks. Micropayments unlock a new business model: pay-per-use.

Example:
Want an AI to generate a meme or build a one-off app? Pay 10 cents, no monthly plan needed.
Coinbase’s new x402 protocol and BitGPT’s payment solution enables this, but most existing blockchains can’t support micro payments at scale without clogging the network. Shardeum’s architecture is purpose-built to meet this demand.

• AI-to-AI payments: AI agents lack a trustless, scalable way to transact autonomously. A secure, low-fee infra layer is essential.
• Splitting bills with friends: Requires centralized apps and delays in settlement. Crypto-native P2P transactions can simplify this.
• Tipping creators: Creators lose a big chunk to platform fees. Direct tipping with negligible transaction cost empowers them.
• Pay-per-use apps (no SaaS lock-ins): SaaS pricing doesn’t work for occasional users. Micro billing gives users flexibility and fairness.
• IoT transactions: Machines need a way to pay each other for resources (bandwidth, energy, etc.). Something traditional finance can’t handle efficiently.
• Per-second streaming means paying only for what you use, in real time — made possible when fees are low enough to handle continuous micro-payments.

The Internet Scaled Globally—Payments Didn’t

The current market capitalization of Ripple (XRP), at approximately $135 billion, and Stellar (XLM), at around $8.7 billion, both of which are primarily focused on payments infrastructure, showcases the significant value and investor confidence in solving real-world financial problems through blockchain.

As a third player entering this space, Shardeum brings a fresh perspective and a focused strategy. It is uniquely positioned with EVM compatibility, enabling seamless integration with the largest developer ecosystem in crypto. With a consumer-first approach to PayFi, Shardeum addresses real-world payment challenges that are yet to be solved at scale. These advantages place Shardeum on the edge of a high growth trajectory.

Shardeum: The Payment Layer of the Open Internet

Instead of competing with hundreds of other chains chasing DeFi, Shardeum is carving its own path in an under served but massively impactful sector. The potential to achieve rapid adoption and value creation lies in better solving payments, arguably the most universal and daily used utility of money.

By focusing on PayFi and supporting both macro and micro payments, Shardeum aims to become the default payments layer of the decentralized internet. This is how we unlock mass adoption and fulfill Satoshi’s original vision. This vision cannot be fulfilled in isolation. Nor can it be achieved by fighting with one another within the Web3 ecosystem. There will be time for competition, but only after we’ve brought mass adoption to crypto. Until then, it’s essential that we unite and work together to solve payments for the Internet.

Shardeum’s PayFi Roadmap

Shardeum’s PayFi roadmap will be released in the coming days, outlining how you can help shape this mission. Stay tuned as we unveil key milestones that will introduce new features, and partnerships, to enable payment-focused services on Shardeum. We’re not just building what’s been done before—we’re unlocking solutions that weren’t previously possible.

Shape the Future of PayFi: Recommend a Partner

We’re actively looking for builders, innovators, and payment solutions to join the journey. If you know someone building in this space—or if you are one—share details through the form and let’s make it happen.

Get SHM

SHM is your key to participating early in a truly decentralized, scalable network built to fill a critical gap in a potentially multi-trillion-dollar industry. Whether you’re a builder, contributor, or early adopter, holding and using SHM in a self-custodial wallet like MetaMask, can unlock immediate benefits. 

Today, you can send transactions on the Shardeum network for less than $0.01 — regardless of network traffic or the amount you transfer. Soon, anyone — from students to seasoned users — will be able to stake SHM directly from their wallet and run a node using minimal hardware and a beginner-friendly interface, in return for rewards. A world of opportunity is just opening up.

Join us. It’s time to make decentralization accessible to everyone.