Shopify is interested in giving businesses an opportunity to experience the benefits of crypto in commerce. Crypto company Solana Labs is glad to oblige.
According to a report from Cryptoslate, Solana Pay, the decentralized payment protocol by Solana Labs, has coordinated with Shopify. This tactical integration grants millions of businesses on Shopify’s platform the ability to leverage Solana Pay for crypto transactions with zero transaction fees until 2024.
A post on the Solana official X (formerly Twitter) profile, linking to a TechCrunch article read;
“Today, Solana Pay integrates with Shopify, empowering the millions of entrepreneurs and merchants on Shopify to accept fast, web3 native payments with no transaction fees through the end of 2023.”
Introduced in February of 2022, Solana Pay is built on the Solana blockchain, and the first payment choice for this integration is USDC, the second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization. The choice of USDC, as Josh Fried of Solana Foundation told TechCrunch, is strategic, given its close ties to the dollar and its regulatory supervision. Be that as it may, he insinuated future considerations for adding SOL.
SolPay is also integrated into the Solana Saga mobile phone and accessible on any device connected to a Solana wallet. The Saga had its price cut nearly in half at the beginning of August to $599, from its launch price of $999.
Over 11 million active accounts on Solana will possibly have access to Shopify businesses, which, according to TechCrunch, make up 10% of the total United States E-commerce and $444 billion of global economic activity. However, companies will likely have to activate Solana Pay in their merchants’ dashboards to accept payments.
Fried repeated to TechCrunch the essential function of payments in the crypto space, stating,
“Some people argue the killer app for crypto hasn’t arrived, but it has its payments.”
This attitude reflects the desire to move towards decentralized payment platforms that seek to lessen business transaction costs. Credit card processing fees typically cost businesses up to 5% per transaction. In comparison, the average cost per transaction on Solana’s blockchain is 1/40th of a cent.
The partnership could also allow merchants to implement loyalty programs with little development effort. According to Fried, these reward systems could be as simple as launching NFT loyalty tokens that are removed from circulation when a consumer checks out using Solana Pay.
This development comes at a time of significant happenings within the crypto space, as some well reputed cryptocurrencies, including SOL, were recently delisted by Robinhood, Bitstamp, and Revolut following SEC lawsuits against crypto exchanges Coinbase and Binance, the leading crypto exchanges worldwide.