The European Union’s largest innovation research program, Horizon 2020, announced Thursday that it granted $2.3 million to the Billion Group to pioneer distributed-ledger technology for the alternative payments market.

The alternative payments market concerns payments made with nontraditional means such as e-wallets, prepaid cards and vouchers. Currently, many of these payment types operate sluggishly because it is not cost-efficient to transfer 50 cents or even $5 of debt in one transaction. These tiny transactions, also called microtransactions, must be bundled together into larger amounts to bring fees down, but that slows down the entire process.

Billion’s vision is to use blockchain technology to provide a secure, distributed ledger to allow for rapid, low-cost microtransactions with a highly trustworthy audit trial. Without the need for waiting around for enough small transactions to bundle together, payment network operators can resolve transactions as quickly as the system can bear.

“We believe content monetization and e-commerce payments will be one of the main drivers behind the global demand for micropayments, especially in emerging markets,” said Tadeusz Kuropatwinski, director of digital payments at Billion. “Today’s payment solutions include clumsy pre-paid vouchers and premium SMS, and Billion can transform this into a digital payment experience on a mobile phone, and with a full audit trail.”

According to Worldpay’s 2016 Global Payments report, the alternative payments market is expected to reach $1.4 trillion – reportedly larger than global debit and credit card volumes.

Robert Kaluza, co-founder and chief operating officer of Billion, said that the company completed a proof-of-concept trial of its content monetization solution in 2016 with digitized Polish currency, the Polish zloty or PLN.

“Billion’s [blockchain] technology is the first cloud and mobile peer-to-peer solution for everyday currencies using [digital ledger technology], where we provide PLN and GBP solutions in partnership with banks,” said Kaluza.

Based on these successful trials and the funding received from Horizon 2020, Billion expects to launch merchant services for ecommerce and content monetization in Poland during autumn. After that, the company plans to expand into the United Kingdom during 2018.

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