“In our own philosophical framework, we are extremely aligned with everything that crypto stands for,” Tobias Lütke, the CEO of Shopify and a Coinbase board member, said onstage at a Coinbase conference on Thursday.
“I think other payment processors will look at what Shopify is building and be like, ‘Holy crap,’” Jesse Pollak, a Coinbase executive who oversees the crypto exchange’s wallet and blockchain divisions, told Fortune.
Shopify’s plunge into crypto comes as stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies pegged to assets like the U.S. dollar, become one of the buzziest sectors outside of AI in Silicon Valley. Rather than wait days for a bank wire to clear, advocates say that stablecoins reduce cross-border transfer fees and speed up transactions.
“This will be the beginning of a lot of dominoes falling,” Pollak, the Coinbase executive, told Fortune, in reference to Shopify’s own stablecoin play.
However, these integrations came from developers outside Shopify and were opt-in, meaning that merchants had to explicitly choose to integrate crypto payments into their online marketplaces.
Shopify’s most recent stablecoin play is opt-out. Merchants will have to adjust their settings to not accept payments in USDC, a Coinbase spokesperson told Fortune. Moreover, the payments protocol Coinbase developed with Shopify is the product of executives and developers from both companies collaborating over the past nine months, Pollak said.
Shopify will give merchants who accept USDC up to 0.5% cash back in the U.S. and other countries, and it plans to also give customers who decide to pay with USDC an unspecified percentage of cash back later this year.
