50,000 Charging Stations to Roll Out Crypto Payments

Two traditional payments companies have announced expansion to crypto payments for electric cars charging stations.

HIPS Payment Group Ltd, that runs some of in-store card payment solutions, has partnered with Vourity, a Swedish leading payment provider for Electric Vehicle (EV) charging stations in Europe

Vourity specializes in unattended sales and stand alone payments, things like vending machines and mini-stores, expanding then to the new industry of EV charging stations.

Currently, the Vourity platform enables EV drivers to pay with credit cards (e.g., Visa and Mastercard), Apple Pay, Google Pay, Swish, and Bluecode.

This partnership with Hips will now expand options to the use of crypto currency with Hans Nottehed, the CEO of Vourity, stating “we are currently evaluating what cryptos/coins we will support. It will be insta converted to fiat.”

Crypto payments will be integrated by connecting to the blockchain via Hips Merchant Protocol’s (HMP) native protocol token Merchant Token (MTO) starting November 2021, they say.

This protocol is described in a previous statement as a Merchant Blockchain that is optimised for real-time merchant transactions created for Payment Service Providers (PSP) and EFTPOS devices. Tricia Buenvenida of Hips told Trustnodes:

“There is no exchange involved at the moment of purchase. The initial beta program that we will launch with Vourity will be for like to like blockchain settlements in MTO (Merchant Token) and USDC Token via the Merchant Protocol. If merchants choose to convert in a later stage, it will be via DEX protocols like Uniswap.”

The roll out to 50,000 EV charging stations across the EU will be over 3 years the companies said.

“At Vourity, we are all about innovation and that starts with listening to EV drivers to understand and address their evolving needs. We want to make it easy for drivers to charge their car and offering an open platform that allows for crypto payments is the most logical choice for our next generation world,” said Nottehed.

Crypto payments have been rolled out since 2017 by Innogy, Germany’s biggest energy provider which at the time began rolling out hundreds of ethereum ev charging stations.

Toronto then began a pilot for blockchain based ev charging last year, with this latest announcement by Hips and Vourity being the biggest rollout to date of crypto ev charging stations.