How Can BOS Blockchain Make an Application like OPay More Efficient
The immensity and thoroughness of OPay marketing made me impressed. I live in the city of Ibadan and if you step out of your apartment/office you will see a sign that says “OPay” or “ORide”. If you don’t see a sign you would see a motorcyclist/bike man riding along with his yellow helmet rocking the Opay logo. I once believed that ride-hailing services won’t work properly in the city but the month of July, I was forced to change my opinion. I was enthused by the ORide/OPay frenzy and so I decided to give it a try. The promo flat rate of 50 Naira per ride may have helped to fuel this enthusiasm. I also ended up trying the only other existing ride-hailing service in Ibadan- Taxify.
OPay is a one-stop mobile-based platform for payment, transportation, food & grocery delivery, and other important services. ORide is a new on-demand motorbike hailing service. The ORide service can be accessed in the OPay app currently on Android and iOS. Both products were created by Opera, the guys who run the Opera Browser.
OPay did massive marketing and a promo of 50 Naira per ride to any location within Ibadan. You could take a ride that would have cost 1000 Naira for a low as 50 Naira($0.14).
Somewhere in between one of my OPay trips I started to imagine how blockchain technology can make a service like OPay/ORide better. At that moment, from a user perspective, OPay seemed like a perfect choice. It was cheaper, faster, and more efficient. Just perfect. How can a blockchain application compete with the OPay applications of this world?
Building OPay on Blockchain like Ethereum would be really bad for everyone; the developers, users, and their families. Imagine that every time someone does a transaction like booking a ride, confirm a ride, e.t.c, they get to pay a gas fee and wait for a couple of minutes for the transaction to go through. It’s simply not going to work.
Blockchain entrepreneurs need to start thinking like this: how can I make things cheaper, faster, more efficient. How can I create superior quality applications that make economic sense for my users? The answer is not far fetched. It’s found in a certain blockchain that was launched in January. The BOS Blockchain is obviously a new kid on the block but it got some special superpowers that make it stand out. By design, BOS is a platform born for DApps (decentralized applications) that are meant for real-world use-cases and businesses, not the experiments we see everywhere in the blockchain industry.
BOS blockchain has superpowers that make it ideal for any blockchain business. Transactions are entirely free on BOS. Transferring money from my access bank account to my OPay account would cost 52 Naira via mobile transfer. Imagine paying for a ride with 50 Naira where the transaction fee is 52 Naira. Outrageous!
In order to avoid the transaction fee from access bank to OPay, I decided to fund my account with a relatively huge lump. I sent 2000 Naira to my OPay account. It never got there and I didn’t realize that the transaction was reversed until after 24 hrs. I also wasn’t the only one that had this issue. I saw some comments on Instagram and Twitter that suggested that other users also experienced this friction.
This kind of inefficiency that I experience in transferring my funds from access bank to my OPay app is not good for business. Assuming OPay was built on the BOS blockchain, the transaction would go through in 0.5 Seconds and after 3 Seconds I would be certain that my transaction can never ever be reversed. Ever! This is true immutability.
According to CNBC, It took 75 years for 100 million users to adopt the telephone; Instagram signed up 100 million users in 2 years while Pokemon Go caught that amount in just one month. We are gradually creeping into the fourth industrial revolution and the major difference between the third and fourth industrial revolution is speed. Look around you everything is happening faster. Everything is getting automated. Very soon your toaster would be able to communicate with your wristwatch without your supervision and they would be able to help you pick up your child from school. Having reversed transactions in this kind of world would be very rare and would be considered as a taboo. Immutability is important.
Blockchain makes it possible to track every transaction with complete transparency. This creates more community engagement in the judging of a product and makes the company more conscious of ethical practices and accountability. Cryptocurrency can be used to encourage ethical business practices. There is a place for private payments in this matter as not every transaction should be public and transparent. Whether transparency or privacy is the question, blockchain is the answer.
As speedy innovative technology ushers us into the fourth industrial revolution, most devices would have a payment capability. This would make things easier for everyone but at the same time, it would create many security concerns and opportunities for cybercrime. Security breaches are already increasing at a rapid pace.
On the 29th of March, 2019 Toyota revealed that there was a security breach on their server (the second attack within five weeks). The attack entailed unauthorized access to a server connected to the companies network could have potentially affected 3.1 million people. Due to its decentralized nature blockchain provides more security for data. In the future, applications like OPay would have to use blockchains as a matter of compulsion because it would be the standard.
Opera launched the world’s first android browser with built-in cryptocurrency wallet in July 2018 making them the first browser to adopt cryptocurrency. I won’t be shocked if they have plans to create a cryptocurrency. An application like Opay would perform better if it was on a BOS blockchain. This is because BOS is more secure, more efficient and faster than its current infrastructure.
For more information about BOS please click on the following links:
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