White Paper

From「Scan to Earn」to 「Mint to Earn」

When we flipped the switch on PolyFlow’s “Scan to Earn” season in late April, no one expected crypto payments to lunge forward this fast. In a matter of weeks, Washington passed the GENIUS Act, setting the golden standard for stablecoins. Circle rang the Nasdaq opening bell the next morning, its market cap topping $10 billion before lunch — a symbolic handshake between Wall Street and crypto. Visa, PayPal, and Stripe answered with their own starting-gun announcements: on-chain settlement pilots that move billions in stablecoins across borders in seconds.

The moment legacy incumbents clear B2B invoices on-chain, “Pay with Crypto” stops being a slogan and becomes a tidal wave washing away yesterday’s rails.

Since its launch in late April, “Scan to Earn” has attracted over 1,000,000 participants, generating tens of millions of scans across real-world payment scenarios worldwide.

From daily coffee purchases to international boarding check-ins, each scan powers the PolyFlow PayFi network and underscores the global demand for seamless crypto payments.

The convergence of these external variables has transformed “PayFi” from an abstract concept in a whitepaper into a tangible industrial pathway: Stablecoin Payments address the question of “How can funds settle instantly, and how can records remain compliant?”; On-chain Finance answers “What can be done with the funds once they arrive?” When these two gears interlock seamlessly, the user experience is distilled into simplicity at the front end — while behind the scenes lies a sophisticated backend architecture of real-time risk control, automated market making, yield aggregation, and identity verification.

This marks the 2.0 vision of “Pay with Crypto, Earn the Future”: Payments become mining. Spending becomes investing. Data becomes property rights.

Cue the “Mint to Earn” season. One question remains: once crypto payments feel as mundane as tap water, how does the average person actually “earn the future”? The answer is an On-chain Profile.

For twenty years, Visa and Mastercard poured hundreds of billions into rails, stockpiling the world’s richest consumer data — and kept every cent of upside for themselves. Users never saw their own data, let alone profited from their creditworthiness. Blockchain writes “data portability” into its base layer. PolyFlow PID (Payment Identity) writes every on-chain payment, every coupon burn, every mile flown directly into the user’s profile.

Think of it as Web3’s “Sesame Credit.” Buy a latte in Bangkok with USDC and the chain quietly logs timestamp, geocoords, merchant category, spend, and gas-discount rate. Mint a flight via PID on a Web3 travel app and the dataset swells with airline tier, seat preference, rebooking cadence, and carbon offsets. Zero-knowledge proofs compress the fragments into PID — private by default, shareable on demand. Need an on-chain credit line? Hand your PID to a DeFi protocol, its ML model scores your cash flow and issues a real-time limit. Want to monetize your preferences for AI training? License the sanitized data to a federated-learning model and collect rent per inference.

To jump-start the flywheel, we’ve teamed up with Web3 travel platform Umy.com. One click mints legacy loyalty tiers into on-chain PIDs and unlocks triple yield:

1. The same airline upgrades and late checkouts you already enjoy.

2. Coupon airdrops are tied to the newly minted status.

3. In the near future, encrypted PID shards will be uploaded to the PolyFlow data market. When an AI firm queries the “high-frequency business traveler” dataset, you will earn USDC royalties proportional to usage. At no point will you need to interact with wallets, private keys, or gas fees; you simply scan your boarding pass while the backend silently mints, authorizes, and splits revenue.

“Mint to Earn” is only the opening act. Once identity is on-chain, users can plug into tomorrow’s financial stack without friction. Imagine: A Shopify plugin that swaps USD checkout flows into USDC in real time and one-click stakes the proceeds in an on-chain money-market fund. A Starbucks “coffee bond”: pre-pay 100 USDC to mint an NFT card redeemable for 102 USDC in 30 days, the yield sourced from floating interest in on-chain lending pools. A UN-WFP refugee-cash program that uses zero-knowledge proofs on PID to verify beneficiaries and airdrops USDC directly to wallets, eliminating leakage and graft.

When the curtain falls on “Mint to Earn,” we will raise it again on “Yield to Earn,” closing the loop from payment rail to asset allocation and turning “Earn the Future” from manifesto into measurable APY.

Only when crypto payments are as invisible as Wi-Fi, on-chain identity as portable as a passport, and every purchase a vote for tomorrow will we have reached PayFi’s promised land: an open financial era where data is self-sovereign and yields are shared. PolyFlow simply opens the door and says —

Welcome to the future. Please mint to earn it.