By June, Shopify Will Let Merchants Accept USDC Stablecoin Payments

The publicly traded tech company lets merchants—including vintage clothes sellers, cosmetics businesses, and electronics companies—set up their own online marketplaces.

Publicly traded tech company Shopify is letting merchants—including vintage clothes sellers, cosmetics businesses, and electronics companies—accept payments in USDC, a stablecoin issued by the crypto company Circle, which recently had one of the year’s hottest IPOs.

The e-commerce company will begin rolling out the new feature later this month with a select group of merchants in the U.S. and Europe, a Coinbase spokesperson tells Fortune. The initiative will then gradually expand to every merchant who uses its platform.

Shopify worked with Coinbase to develop a payments protocol to handle chargebacks, refunds, and other intricacies of retail payments on Coinbase’s blockchain, Base. It also collaborated with fintech giant Stripe, one of Shopify’s payments processors, to integrate stablecoins into the e-commerce company’s existing software stack.

“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, tells Fortune.

The move 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.

Tech giants like Meta, Apple, X, Airbnb, and Google have taken notice and have all been in talks with crypto companies to explore stablecoin integrations. Moreover, the Senate is poised to pass legislation that regulates the crypto assets. And Stripe has acquired two crypto startups in the past year as it looks to carve out its own crypto payments strategy.

“This will be the beginning of a lot of dominoes falling,” Pollak, the Coinbase executive, says.

The integration also marks the latest chapter in Shopify’s own crypto journey.

The Ottawa-based company has long let third-party software developers like Crypto.com and Strike provide plug-ins for merchants to accept cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and even USDC for payment. But these integrations were opt-in, meaning that merchants had to explicitly choose to integrate crypto payments into their online marketplaces.

The company’s own most recent stablecoin play is opt-out. Merchants will have to adjust their settings to not accept payments in USDC.

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 says.

The move also marks a new chapter in Shopify’s cash-back program. Merchants who accept USDC will get up to 0.5% cash back in the U.S. and other countries, and the company plans to also give customers who decide to pay with USDC an unspecified percentage of cash back later this year.