nanoPay Corporation, a loyalty and payment platform tech start-up in Toronto, has acquired all the assets related to MintChip, a fledgling digital currency developed by the Royal Canadian Mint (RCM), which has been in the coin making business for over 100 years, and likened to Bitcoin – but backed originally by the Canadian dollar. Plans are now afoot to commercialize the technology during 2016 under the new custodians.
Discussions between the parties are understood to have taken the best part of a year, with the transaction’s consideration remaining undisclosed. The divestiture process, which was run by Origin Merchant Partners , an independent investment bank that provides corporate finance, M&A and merchant banking services, included three rounds of interested parties numbering 10 companies. NanoPay eventually won through to the final round where they had a period of exclusivity to negotiate the detailed terms.
As a digital payment technology with many of the attributes of cash, MintChip was initially developed by the RCM in around April 2012 and as a fiat alternative to Bitcoin – then being billed as a digital currency stored on a microSD card. And, the Mint even ran a competition offering coins and gold bars worth $50,000 for tech boffins to create applications using the MintChip. The Royal Canadian Mint stands in Winnipeg, Ontario, Canada. (Photographer: Brent Lewin/Bloomberg). NanoPay, which also has a presence in San Francisco is headed up by Laurence Cooke, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), has developed a mobile-payment offering that is similar to the Apple Pay, a mobile payment and digital wallet allowing users to make payment with their iPhone 6, 6 Plus, Apple Watch or iPad.
It’s important though to note that the difference between MintChip and Apple Pay, is that the former is a digital currency while the latter is an application that customers can […]
