SatoshiPay partners with The Register
We are proud to announce our first official partnership with a major news outlet. The Register, UK’s largest tech news website, is now using SatoshiPay to sell digital content. To celebrate this, 1,000,000 Stellar lumens will be given away to SatoshiPay users as free credit.
Geek’s Guide to Britain
Apart from running the popular tech news site theregister.co.uk, with more than four million monthly visitors, and organising conferences, The Register publishes a travel guide for, well, geeks. It maps UK’s most significant places of technological, scientific and engineering wonders, and was previously available as a printed edition only. Using SatoshiPay’s payment system and integrated secured content delivery network, the Geek’s Guide is now available as an ebook, a full PDF and individual PDF files for each chapter.
We found The Register, with its logo featuring a vulture, which famously “bites the hand that feeds IT,” to be very receptive to the idea of trialing alternative monetisation schemes. The recent innovations in the field of blockchain micropayments in particular, caught the eye of the folks at The Register as a potential means for putting ads-free content in the hands of its readers and for creating additional revenue. In their words:
Gavin Clarke, managing editor, The Register said: “The publishing industry is locked in a battle between readers who don’t want invasive ads and publishers who want to monetise their content. Recent advances in blockchain and crypto currencies offer the chance to break that deadlock. The Geek’s Guide to Britain ebook micropayments pilot provides the opportunity to assess these developments, letting readers invest in the kind of quality writing they’ve come to expect from The Register while providing additional income for our business.”
As a side note, we have been assured by The Register’s editorial team, that engaging with us is not an elaborate practical joke to top their 2017 April Fools’ Day announcement of a Reg Bitcoin browser mining paywall. 🙃
The popular Geek’s Guide to Britain series is being offered via SatoshiPay as a pilot to assess when and where to make more of The Register’s content available in an advertisement-free environment. It’s up to you to make this pilot a success! If you are curious about geeky places within Britain, why not head over to The Register’s website and buy a chapter of their guide?
Meinhard Benn, founder and CEO at SatoshiPay, said: “The way people consume media is changing and technology is playing a huge role in evolving publishers’ content payment methods and sources of income. We see blockchain technology and Stellar in particular as a significant enabler of this evolution. With micropayments, publishers can cater for their readers’ demand for reduced advertising, whilst charging a small fee for viewing content. This is SatoshiPay’s first entry into mainstream publishing in the UK and we are proud to have partnered with one of the most outspoken and celebrated technology publications in the world in a venture that could change the digital publishing landscape forever.”
Powered by Stellar
We’ve continued to improve our Stellar network based transaction system, with improved multi-signature handling, more sophisticated fraud protection and increased stability of our custom Stellar wallet. The Register will run our default website widget, meaning that all funds topped up elsewhere will also be available on theregister.co.uk pages that include our widget.
Jed McCaleb, co-founder of the Stellar Development Foundation, the non-profit organisation behind the Stellar network, said: “This is an exciting moment for Stellar and the cryptocurrency community as a whole, as it represents one of the first mainstream uses of blockchain payments in reaching millions of consumers. We’re proud to be powering SatoshiPay, helping make micropayments faster and cheaper than ever and thereby bolstering the publishing industry in its quest to unlock additional revenue streams in the new digital age.”
Our partnership with the Stellar.org foundation is constantly evolving and have been invited to join their Money 20/20 Europe satellite event in Amsterdam to present an update on SatoshiPay’s progress — details to follow.
Second wave of giveaways: 50 XLM for 20,000 users
After the successful first wave of lumens as free credit for our users, we are launching the next wave, distributing 1,000,000 XLM (worth ~ €270k), 50 XLM (~ €14) per user. Look out for the giveaway button in the top-up screen of our widget!
Behind the scenes
Apart from preparing this publisher partnership, we have been busy expanding our team (more on that in separate announcements), adding office space (thanks to TechCode Berlin for making this possible) and preparing our technical infrastructure for more growth (Kubernetes, here we come).
Follow us on Twitter @SatoshiPay to stay up to date with our latest developments, and of course check our jobs page if you would like to work with us!
Meinhard Benn, CEO at SatoshiPay
