Rethinking Payments

Crunchfish is rethinking payments by enabling transactions to occur without online service availability, due to either network connectivity issues or server outages. From rural merchants in remote areas to urban customers impacted by network congestion or service disruptions, the ability to pay no matter what is rapidly becoming an essential feature of modern financial ecosystems.

Rethinking Online Payments:

Survivability in the Face of Failure – A Packet-Based Approach

Just as the internet transformed digital communications in the 90’s into a much more robust and resilient packet-based approach introduces Crunchfish’s patent-pending Trusted Application Protocol (TAP) resilience to the application layer of, for instance, digital payments by designing payment traffic with a packet-based communication architecture inspired by the TCP/IP protocols that built the internet. TAP ensures that payment applications function reliably even during backend server failures or disrupted network conditions. TAP works across proximity protocols (QR code, Bluetooth, NFC) and remote protocols (internet or SS7 signaling), making it transport-layer agnostic, ensuring secure end-to-end communication between clients as well as between clients and servers. With private key in a trusted client in a PKI-based architecture, TAP ensures secure communications in between clients and between clients and servers using software-based isolated runtime execution environments by virtual secure elements in the clients, offering unmatched security and scalability for both offline and online environments.

Rethinking Offline Payments:

Reserve, Pay, and Settle with Digital IOUs

Crunchfish’s signature offline payment solution enables digital payments to function even when disconnected from backend systems or the internet. Built on a patented architecture, the Reserve, Pay, and Settle (RPS) model allows payment ecosystems to operate seamlessly offline by issuing Digital IOUs locally in trusted client devices. These IOUs are reconciled securely when connectivity is restored, ensuring trust, scalability and interoperability across domestic and international payment networks. The patented solution is payment network agnostic and even makes diverse payment networks interoperable regardless if it is real-time payment networks (e.g., UPI, Pix), card networks (e.g., Visa, Mastercard), CBDCs, mobile money, stable coins, other cryptocurrencies, or closed-loop payment systems.

Rethinking Physical Cash:

Returning Change Digitally

By providing digital change instead of coins or small banknotes, merchants can solve this pain point while reducing operational inefficiencies and logistical overhead. Leveraging Crunchfish’s offline payment technology, merchants sign Digital IOUs for returning exact change digitally, and customers only need offline terminals to receive the change. This decreases logistical challenges significantly surrounding coins and small denominations. Reduces cash handling costs while simplifying the payment experience, it provides a natural fit for Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), allowing physical cash-backed change to be issued as CBDC.