Shopify customers will soon have the option to pay merchants in Circle’s USDC stablecoin. The e-commerce giant announced on Thursday that it has partnered with Coinbase and Stripe to enable payments in the dollar-pegged cryptocurrency on the Ethereum-based layer-2 blockchain, Base (BASE).
The initiative enables merchants to streamline stablecoin payments by interfacing directly with an established blockchain network, eliminating the need for an in-house infrastructure.
Shopify Set to Launch USDC Payment Option as Standard for Merchants Across the US and Europe
Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke broke the news at the 2025 Coinbase State of Crypto Summit, where he was joined by Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong. He told the audience that the publicly traded tech firm is “extremely aligned with everything crypto stands for” and believes that stablecoins are a “natural way” to transact on the internet.
The e-commerce platform that helps merchants start, run, and grow various online businesses, including cosmetics, healthcare, apparel, and electronics, in over 175 countries has chosen a select group of merchants across 35 countries to accept payments in USDC. Circle (CRCL), the company behind the stablecoin, recently had one of the hottest IPOs of the year.
The feature will launch in early access today and then gradually expand across Shopify’s network in the US and Europe before being made available to all merchants using the platform by the end of the year.
Previously, shoppers on Shopify could pay merchants in USDC on Solana via plugins like Solana Pay or Coinbase Commerce. That plugin got a major update in 2024, opening the door to payments using hundreds of SOL-based assets. Soon, customers will have the option to pay with USDC on Base, the same way as any other payment rail on the platform.
Shopify, in collaboration with Coinbase, has developed the ‘Commerce Payments Protocol’ that will handle chargebacks, refunds, and other retail payment intricacies on the Base blockchain. Stripe, one of Shopify’s payment processors, has also joined the initiative to build a permissionless payments protocol and smart contract to handle crypto mechanics and integrate stablecoin technology into the e-commerce company’s existing software stack.
Lutke noted that Shopify’s smart contract is modeled around the complex state machine of taking escrow money and releasing it to merchants once the transaction is finalized.
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Merchants Will Receive 0.5%, While Buyers Can Get Up to 1% Cashback for USDC Payments on Shopify
Base software engineer Conner Swenberg wrote in an X post that until now, on-chain payments have only been suitable for peer-to-peer transactions, and Shopify’s implementation is the first on a commercial scale that requires a multi-stage payment commitment procedure. He noted that the Commerce Payments Protocol will enable on-chain commerce at scale, and fill the gap by eliminating the disparities that come with merchants canceling orders or making part-by-part deliveries, and customers requesting refunds as a result.
As part of a promotional campaign, the protocol will allow merchants to provide buyer incentives, like a 1% cash back on USDC purchases. Merchants can keep the funds in the stablecoin or choose to receive the normal local currency payout.
This isn’t the publicly traded Canadian e-commerce giant’s first foray into crypto. It has supported merchants in integrating third-party plugins to accept payments in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and Solana (SOL). However, these services were opt-in and not natively provided by Shopify, meaning that merchants had to explicitly choose to integrate crypto payments into their marketplaces.
Whereas, the new USDC payments option is opt-out, meaning that merchants will have to adjust their settings to not accept the stablecoin from shoppers. Shopify is offering merchants who accept USDC up to 0.5% in cash back in the US and Europe.
Shopify’s payments partner, Stripe, recently acquired crypto wallet infrastructure company Privy, which is best known for its embedded wallet technology that provides a simpler onboarding experience for users new to crypto, where they don’t have to deal with the complexity of memorizing or storing seed phrases. Last year, Stripe acquired stablecoin payment platform Biridge for $1.1 billion and added support for tokens issued on the Avalanche (AVAX) blockchain.
USDC is the largest stablecoin after Tether USD (USDT), with a market capitalization of $61.04 billion. It has attained a trading volume of $15.26 billion over the past day and is currently ranked #7 among the top-100 cryptocurrencies, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Last week, USDC issuer Circle held its initial public offering (IPO) on the NYSE for an offering price of $31 per share. The price of the crypto firm’s CRCL stock has more than quadrupled since then and closed at $106.54 per share on Thursday. Meanwhile, the shares of both Shopify (SHOP) and Coinbase (COIN) are down 4%.
At the time of writing, the BASE token is trading at $0.000002729, down 10.17% in the last 24 hours.
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