Through a partnership with Stripe and Coinbase, Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify is rolling out support for the USDC stablecoin, a cryptocurrency backed by the United States (US) dollar, within Shopify Payments and Shop Pay.
The payments update, which is currently in early access but set to roll out to Shopify merchants throughout the year, allows stores to accept USDC through Coinbase’s Base network as payment and convert to their local currency, if they desire, with no extra setup.
Shopify is incentivizing the payment method with merchants in select countries receiving an up to half-percent rebate on USDC orders, and customers in the United States (US) using USDC are set to receive a rebate of their own later this year. In a blog post, Shopify said that, by embracing stablecoins, merchants are “tapping into global markets” and “opening the door to global customers.”
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke announced the integration alongside Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong at the Coinbase State of Crypto summit in New York City.
“We think that stablecoins are a natural way to transact on the Internet and worked with coinbase to develop the commerce payment protocol smart contract that powers this work,” Lütke said in an X post, adding in another that “Stripe helped us make this totally seamless.”
Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies with prices that are designed to be less volatile because they are pegged to a “stable” asset, in this case the US dollar. However, they do run the risk of “depegging” and deviating from the value of their stabilizing asset, which has happened to USDC twice before. USDC is issued by Coinbase subsidiary Circle. Lütke has been on Coinbase’s board of directors since 2022.
Crypto has come back into focus as US President Donald Trump’s administration has done the industry a massive favour by overhauling cryptocurrency regulations and pledging to start a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” (of questionable utility), all of which has led to major gains for cryptocurrency companies in recent months.
Former BlackBerry co-CEO Jim Balsillie called on the federal government to prioritize stablecoins in a conversation with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith in Calgary last month.
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“If we don’t get stablecoins and open banking in Canada, Trump is just going to bypass Canada’s fiat currency,” he said. “There’s no defence anymore, there’s just good offence.”
Last month, Coinbase invested in Toronto-based Stablecorp to help it “significantly enhance the feature set and structure” of QCAD, its stablecoin pegged to the Canadian dollar. The investment was revealed the same day Coinbase announced it was affected by a cyberattack that could cost the company up to $400 million USD ($554 million CAD) to recover from.
Shopify recently won its two-year legal fight against Canada’s tax authority when a federal court dismissed a request compelling Shopify to turn over information about Canadian merchants who use its software.
Disclosure: BetaKit majority owner Good Future is the family office of two former Shopify leaders, Arati Sharma and Satish Kanwar.
Feature image courtesy Burst.