Stablecoin Payments at the POS for Avolta

The starting point defined the project: the payment should behave like cash. Exact, final at handover, with nobody holding the money in between. The customer sends USDC from their own wallet to a single-use address, and the funds move into Avolta-owned wallets. No processor, no card network, no custodian in the path. Five parties become two.

A payment made directly between two parties is treated differently around the world, which made the choice of market for the pilot a design question. We screened regulatory environments for where direct customer-to-merchant payment is clearly recognized, and Switzerland, meeting this requirement, was chosen as the country to carry out the pilot. The duty-free store at Zurich Airport was chosen for being high volume and international, with its customers already paying in a currency that is not their own.

The principle was to keep the footprint small on both sides for the pilot setup. At the till, one compact device that staff can use with minimal training and that adds no time to the checkout process. In the backend, a sidecar running alongside the existing point of sale rather than inside it, so nothing in the till core changed and this never became a platform project. Compliance screening runs inside that flow, before a payment is accepted.

The receiving accounts and wallets could have been bought off the shelf, but this option would have put a provider back into the acceptance path, which is what the first decision removed, so we built that layer instead. The wallets are non-custodial and single-use. The architecture targets any EVM-compatible chain and any ERC-20 token, with the pilot running USDC on Base.