Currently PayPal is moving around $2,200 per second, across 24 different currencies and 190 countries. But as the shape of online sales shifts away from major credit card purchases and towards microstransactions and mobile payments, the financial company has launched a competition to encourage developers to put its range of new Adaptive Payment APIs to broader use.

The eBay-founded company has developed these APIs to break away from the we-based, redirection payment system, allowing all kinds of uses from Facebook applications to mobile payments and credit card alternatives.

"I think if you look at what PayPal started off with, it was kind of like four failed business models and the fifth business model was the ability to send money to each other, and through a demo which was going from one Palm Pilot to another Palm Pilot," PayPal's Naveed Anwar tells RadarOReilly.

"So doing and working from a demo point-of-view where the developer community goes back to its roots, and we really wanted to go back to our roots and work directly with the community."

The competition is offering a total of $150,000 in prizes, with the $100,000 grand prize split into $50,000 cash and $50,000 waived PayPal fees, and the $50,000 second place prize split in half in the same manner.

"I don't want to push people in a particular area, but really looking in ways on how we can solve the problem of transactions on mobile devices is something that excites and interests me a lot," Anwar continues. "I see a lot of (…) digital goods such as video games where a lot of the development community is out in Southeast Asia. In particular, you have developers setting out in India, China, as well as Singapore where someone wants to buy a quick experience on a digital good, be that a game on Facebook, be that a game in some other social networking environment."

The deadline for entries is December 16th, so head on over to the official PayPal X Developer Challenge page for more information.