The inception of this project came about over a discussion over building a fast network on Polkadot - what that would look like and what would take to build it.
First good real use case for a fast Polkadot network would be payments. We are already lagging behind our competitors - look at Solana: sub-400ms payments.
Slap is framing itself to be “the payment network of Polkadot”. This team is a perfect fit for this project as their previous work with UTXO’s and ZK via web3 grants will fit nicely to build a first-of-its-kind “only on Polkadot” solution with privacy-preserving transactions with optional disclosure.
Applying for funding from the DF Program has required the team to put a “product hat” on and I am proud of the work that they have done in this direction, as a technical partner for the team, I have seen the internals of their work for the SLAP proposal.
My push is for the team to do consulting with web2/3 payment solution providers to gain deeper knowledge into the space, iterate the platform to be the premier crypto payment solution of choice in Web3.
Fast payments is the first step. From there, payment solution providers can build permissionless use cases on Polkadot via Pop Network smart contracts. Pop Network has a Pop API which will have useful primitives including cross-chain primitives to make developing interopable contracts accessible to smart contract developers. As the SLAP team mentioned, payments is not a one person job, you have multiple audiences involved: customer, merchant, payment solution provider, and POS. Cutting out the likes of VISA/Mastercard in favor of crypto, creating more efficient fee distribution amongst the players involves, and incentives are all possible.
SLAP aims to be the infrastructure platform for payments. If we all help on-ramp web2 payment solutions to SLAP, this will benefit the community as a whole, as currently there are many web2 payment solution providers that would like to offer crypto payments. We can disrupt our competitors be offering a more compelling package.