Spondula, a Manchester-based payments startup, has opened reservations for what it calls S-Handles, portable payment identities the company plans to launch in beta on June 1.
The company describes S-Handles as reusable payment identities that function in the way social media usernames do for messaging, but in a financial context. Rather than exchanging bank account numbers, card details, or wallet addresses each time, a sender can route a payment to a recipient’s S-Handle. The company is positioning the handles for cross-border money movement, creators and freelancers who receive payments from multiple sources, online merchants needing a lightweight checkout identifier, and what it calls digitally native users operating across borders. “S-Handles are designed to become part of a user’s financial identity online,” a Spondula spokesperson said.
The company said more than 200 S-Handles are being reserved per day. Early sign-ups receive 10 dollars in BTCS at registration and another 10 dollars in BTCS for successful referrals after the platform goes live. Spondula did not detail the payment rails, networks, or currencies the platform will support, and the company’s claims about user demand have not been independently corroborated.
The product enters a category of human-readable payment identifiers that has built up in different forms around the world. National instant payment schemes such as India’s UPI use Virtual Payment Addresses tied to a bank account, and Brazil’s Pix lets a user register a phone number, email address, taxpayer number, or random key as a routing identifier. Consumer payment apps such as Venmo and Cash App use @usernames and $cashtags in place of account details, and crypto-native naming services such as the Ethereum Name Service play a similar role on public blockchains. Spondula is positioning S-Handles as a layer that works across rails and currencies rather than a tag bound to a single underlying account.
For the identity field, the question is how a payment handle is bound to a verified person, how that binding is maintained when the user moves between currencies and networks, and how recipient identity is communicated to a sender so that a payment cannot be misdirected. Reusable identity approaches in the broader KYC market typically anchor a verified credential to a person at onboarding and let it be presented to subsequent relying parties. Spondula did not publish details of the identity verification it will require at account creation, or of how it will represent the holder of an S-Handle to a counterparty.
Sources: EIN Presswire
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
