I know it's a bit late, but I've just read about this on another newspaper and I have some questions:
1. Netopia already offers Bitcoin payment at a couple of online stores (PC Garage, evoMag, ..) but
they are not that many. Will ERD payment be available at a bigger number of online stores?
2. Netopia has quite a fee for Bitcoin payments (inflated price when seen in Bitcoin). Will indeed be no fee for ERD, or I've misunderstood something?
3. Will ERD be available on a bigger number of exchanges?
4. When is all this payment thing planned to go live?
Good questions.
Here is the most important part of the announcement highlighted:
"Elrond and NETOPIA aim to jointly explore the potential of integrating Elrond’s token, ERD, into the NETOPIA payment platform allowing their merchants to offer on their turn to their users and clients the possibility to acquire products and services through ERD tokens as well.
This will also mean that 6,000+ merchants who are using the NETOPIA solutions will be able to accept ERD cryptocurrency overnight, with no development or operational costs on their part."
For reference about Netopia:
"NETOPIA is the biggest electronic payment processor in Romania, expecting to process in 2018 more than 13 million digital transactions with a total value of around $400 Million."
So to answer your questions:
1. This partnership will bring over 6000 online stores where Elrond will be accepted. Lots of other stores and means of using Elrond will come to add on this and will be announced as we advance.
2. There will not be any fee on the development or integration side for the merchants accepting Elrond. I suspect the standard fee will apply for Elrond at first.
3. Definitely. We are already working on this, and will make announcements as conclude discussions with some of the exchanges. The important part is for us to launch the tech, listings will come with that.
4. Payment utility should go live as soon as we launch the token. We expect this to happen sometime in Q1 2019. We're working hard to reach these targets.