Electronic Currency

Electronic money (also known as e-money, electronic cash, electronic currency, digital money, digital cash or digital currency) refers to money or scrip which is exchanged only electronically. Typically, this involves use of computer networks, the internet and digital stored value systems

Peppercoin is acryptographic system for processing micropayments. Peppercoin Inc. was a company that offers services based on the peppercoin method. Peppercoin is a small payments technology company transforming routine card transactions into new revenue opportunities.

Peppercoin's platform accelerates the cash to card transition, getting customers to come back more often and spend more using the cards in their wallets - all while costing merchants less. Only Peppercoin provides a loyalty-ready PCI-compliant small payments suite for all payment models, including pre-paid, subscription, and pay-as-you-go with Intelligent Aggregation.

The peppercoin system was developed by Silvio Micali and Ron Rivest and first presented at the RSA Conference in 2002The core idea is to bill one randomly selected transaction a lump sum of money rather than bill each transaction a small amount. It uses "universal aggregation", which means that it aggregates transactions over users, merchants as well as payment service providers. The random selection is cryptographically secure -- it cannot be influenced by any of the parties. It is claimed to reduce the transaction cost per dollar from 27 cents to "well below 10 cents."

Peppercoin, Inc. was a privately held company founded in late 2001 by Micali and Rivest based in Waltham, MA. It has secured about $15M in venture capital in two rounds of funding. Its services have seen modest adoption. Peppercoin collects 5-9% of transaction cost from the merchant. Peppercoin, Inc. was bought out in 2007 by Chockstone for an undisclosed amount.

Waltham-based Peppercoin has landed a deal to provide Wurld Media with its Peppercoin Small Transaction Suite payments software to allow Wurld Media to sell legal digital content through Peer Impact, its peer-to-peer (P2P) network.

Using Peppercoin's software will allow Wurld Media to accept credit and debit cards for small payments, such as individual media downloads. No financial details of the deal were disclosed.
According to New York-based Wurld Media, its Peer Impact is the first P2P network in the world to sign agreements with the four major record labels. Peer Impact's business model is different from other paid music P2P services in that it allows consumers to earn money back by legally sharing their authorized music content with others.

Peppercoin enables profitable new business models for low-priced digital content and physical goods. Peppercoin's small-payment products help merchants, banks and other payments companies build market adoption quickly through a flexible, consumer-friendly approach.