THE POSSIBILITY OF USING DISTRIBUTED LEDGER TECHNOLOGIES AS PAYMENT INFRASTRUCTURE

Abstract

The Internet of Things represents a communication network that enables people to interact with things, machines and objects in the business and living environment. Adding the ability to perform transactions to the information component leads to the creation of the so-called Internet of Value. Modern payment processing mechanisms do not meet the needs of the Internet of Value. In order to achieve a fast and economical financial flow, it is necessary to overcome the fragmentation of traditional payment systems and adopt the organizational structure of the Internet. The subject of the paper is the characteristics of three distributed ledger technologies. The aim of this paper is to determine the possibility of their use in order to build a payment infrastructure for the realization of the Internet of Value concept. Although the issue of security of the new payment infrastructure is equally important, the paper will focus on three key performances of the observed distributed ledger technologies: costs, throughput and scalability. The qualitative analysis shows that none of the analyzed technologies in practice has adequate performance in terms of throughput and scalability. Most operational solutions, even in experimental conditions, achieve poorer results than theoretically predicted ones.