EFTPOS Australia Plans To Use Blockchain For Micropayments, Autonomous Vehicles, and Digital Identity

During the Australian Blockchain Week conference, Australia’s leading point-of-sale technology provider EFTPOS announced that they plan to use blockchain-powered technologies to run autonomous vehicles and power smart cities with Hedera Hashgraph.

Ben Tabell, EFTPOS chief investment officer, stated that the partnership formed with Hedera will allow them to put in a shared effort to bring a combination of digital identity and payment solutions to Australia.

We’re going to be looking at smart cities. […] We’re going to be looking at autonomous vehicles and things that we haven’t even thought about yet. All of this needs new infrastructure, and EFTPOS needs to be informed by that.

Robert Allen, deputy chair of Blockchain Australia

This is a big part of our work and effort at the moment to bring in digital identity and transactions so that we can securely support payments and other transaction clubs in the Australian digital ecosystem.

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Ben Tabell, chief investment officer at EFTPOS

Hedera Implementing Blockchain Use Cases in Australia

Hedera Hashgraph had previously also made local headlines in Australia in July 2020, when EFTPOS announced that they would be using Hedera technology to build a proof-of concept for an Australian stablecoin. The pilot focused on micropayments, such as real-time payments for streaming and pay-per-click content.

In January 2021, EFTPOS became Hedera’s 17th governing council member and Australia’s first Hedera node operator. Hedera has also been expanding its governing council recently, with Shinhan Bank joining earlier this month, French utility giant Électricité de France onboarding in March, and Standard Bank Group becoming the network’s first African node operator in February.

Hedera is the only next-generation network that will support those kinds of use cases. So, we wanted to test it, and it has operated beautifully. […] Now, because we’ve got all this digital strategy, we are in a position where we can start looking at ways that problems can be solved in a way which is maybe non-traditional and more distributed.

Ben Tabell, chief investment officer at EFTPOS