Dive Insight:

• Gilded, a blockchain software startup, has launched a crypto payment platform to help businesses make payments using crypto currencies.

• The Crypto Mass Pay platform will allow businesses to pay up to 500 employees at once in Ethereum tokens and major stablecoins, including USDC, Gilded said today in a statement on its site.

• Gilded's new offering is integrable with Quickbooks, Xero, Netsuite and other major accounting software to reduce the burden of account management on businesses. 

Dive Brief:

With the retail and institutional adoption of cryptocurrencies rising, the digital asset class has surpassed $2 trillion in market capitalization this year. 

Some employers and employees alike are looking to be paid in cryptocurrency as the trend continues to catch wind. Organizations including Twitter, the City of Miami and NBA team Sacramento Kings are exploring ways to pay their employees in digital currencies, according to recent reports.

Gilded's Crypto Mass Pay platform aims to help businesses pay their employees in either digital currencies or a 'crypto wage alternative.'

The Los Angeles-based startup calls itself a "team of developers and CPAs who believe that the future of finance is global, open and powered by blockchain" on its site. It has raised $500,000 since it was incorporated in 2018, Gilded CEO and Founder Gil Hildebrand said.

"We had customers saying that we have people on our payroll that want to be paid in crypto," Hildebrand said in an interview. Some online marketplaces also reached out to Gilded, saying they had demand from their users who wanted to be paid in cryptocurrencies, he said. He declined to name the marketplaces.

The platform currently is able to pay reimbursements in Ethereum and major stablecoins such as USDC and will add other crypto currencies like Bitcoin in the coming months. It is also integrable with Quickbooks, Xero, Netsuite and other accounting software.

"Currently, we are a non-custodial solution, so businesses need to bring their own digital wallet to us and we can provide payments to their employees through that," Hildebrand said. 

Gilded's new platform processes cross-border payments 24 hours a day and seven days a week. "Ethereum doesn't close for bank holidays," Hildebrand said. The blockchain technology allows transparency too, he said.

"It's fast, it's real time and it's global," he said. "With the traditional payment methods like wire transfers, it could take a day, it could take a weekend, and you have no transparency on the process, and that's really one of the most frustrating things when you're making international payments is you really don't know where in the process the payment is," he said.

For every transaction and payroll Gilded processes, it charges a 0.5% fee, which is nearly 40% lower than the average cost of a crypto transaction, Hildebrand said. 

Crypto currencies have come under fire on multiple occasions for not being environmentally friendly. Bitcoin, the most well-known digital asset, has a carbon footprint equal to that of New Zealand on an annual basis. And emissions are expected to increase with more usage.

"Crypto miners actually benefit from finding the cheapest power they can, and increasingly often that's green energy," Hildebrand said. "It's like with any new technology, it starts out inefficient...and it's becoming more efficient over time."

For the coming year, Gilded plans on building its Crypto Mass Pay into an application interface that other developers can build on. It also aims to add more currencies to its platform later this year.