Facebook, Inc.

Guy Rom

George Lee

Jared S Morgenstern

Daniel Alan Levy

Reshma Khilnani Ebberson

Prashant Fuloria

Bikash Kumar Agarwalla

Payment providers interact with an online service provider using a standard interface provided by the online service provider for different payment providers. A payment provider can invoke the interface of the online service provider to add credits for a user of the online service provider. The online service provider allows users to make purchases using credits. The online service provider authorizes purchases made by the user based on credits available for the user or based on a history of payments from the user. The online service provider sends an invoice based on the purchases to the payment provider. The payment provider can be any system that can invoke the interface provided by the online service provider. For example, the payment provider can be a financial institution, another user, or a business that provides credits to the user for performing actions that benefit the business.

Payment platform for online service providers

A virtual currency system keeps track of virtual credits, which can be owned, transferred, purchased, and sold by participants in a virtual economy. Each virtual credit has an internal value and an external value, which define, respectively, the exchange rates for creating and redeeming the virtual credits. Upon creation of new virtual credits, the internal value for those credits is the rate for which real currency was paid per credit. The external value sets the rate at which the virtual credits can be redeemed for real currency. Each virtual credit may further have a face value, which is an apparent value of the virtual credit within the virtual economy, giving users a baseline impression for valuing the virtual currency. These features of the virtual currency enable a number of useful actions within the virtual economy, including currency seeding, couponing, and chargebacks.

Creation, redemption, and accounting in a virtual currency system

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Sunnyvale, CA, United States of America

Guy Rom