Peppercoin

Peppercoin is a cryptographic system for processing micropayments. Peppercoin Inc. was a company that offers services based on the peppercoin method.

The peppercoin system was developed by Silvio Micali and Ron Rivest and first presented at the RSA Conference in 2002[1] (although it had not yet been named.) The core idea is to bill one randomly selected transaction a lump sum of money rather than bill each transaction a small amount. It uses "universal aggregation", which means that it aggregates transactions over users, merchants as well as payment service providers. The random selection is cryptographically secure—it cannot be influenced by any of the parties. It is claimed to reduce the transaction cost per dollar from 27 cents to "well below 10 cents."[2]

Peppercoin, Inc. was a privately held company founded in late 2001 by Micali and Rivest based in Waltham, MA. It has secured about $15M in venture capital in two rounds of funding.[3][4] Its services have seen modest adoption.[5][6] Peppercoin collects 5-9% of transaction cost from the merchant.[7] Peppercoin, Inc. was bought out in 2007 by Chockstone for an undisclosed amount.[4]

  1. ^ S. Micali and R. L. Rivest. Micropayments revisited Archived 2008-02-26 at the Wayback Machine. In B. Preneel, editor, Proc. Cryptography Track at RSA Conference 2002, pages 149–263. Springer, 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 2271.
  2. ^ "2003 press release". 29 Sep 2003. Archived from the original on 16 Mar 2006.
  3. ^ "Company history". Peppercoin.com. Archived from the original on 15 October 2006.
  4. ^ a b Micro-payment's Peppercoin Bought Out Archived January 19, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
  5. ^ "Peppercoin picked by Wurld Media for P2P payment system". Archived from the original on 2012-08-06. Retrieved 2012-09-09.
  6. ^ "Peppercoin scoops up customer for loyalty program". Boston Business Journal. Archived from the original on 2017-03-02. Retrieved 2017-03-01.(subscription required)
  7. ^ "Peppercoin, Inc. Response to the Request for Information By the Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities Technology Task Force" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-10-05. Retrieved 2012-09-09.