What do your local Chinese restaurant’s delivery service and MIT’s advanced cryptography department have in common? The answer: Peppercoin, an innovative payment platform allowing consumers to use credit or debit cards for small transactions -- thus eliminating merchants’ need for those annoying $10 minimums on credit card purchases (e.g. last night’s sesame chicken, when I had to order egg rolls to get over the $10 hump).

Peppercoin has been around since 2001, the result of two MIT professors’ efforts to commercialize their revolutionary payment protocols (Verisign and Zero Knowledge Proofs). As it stands, high processing and customer service costs discourage merchants - both online and physical - from accepting issuers’ credit and debit cards for small purchases. Peppercoin aggregates small transactions to increase efficiency and lower merchants' cost. Furthermore, the service lies wholly on the merchant side, making it invisible to consumers – so I can buy my sesame chicken with a credit card, no up-sell egg rolls necessary.