Shopify integrates with Solana Pay with zero fees, encouraging businesses to implement crypto transactions
Date: 2023-08-24 Author: Karina Ziganova Categories: BLOCKCHAIN, CRYPTO PAYMENTS
Solana Pay, a decentralized payment protocol from Solana Labs, has integrated with Shopify. This strategic integration allows millions of businesses on the Shopify platform to use Solana Pay for zero transaction fees cryptocurrency transactions through 2024.
A post on Solana X's official profile, citing a TechCrunch article, read;
“Today, Solana Pay is integrating with Shopify, enabling millions of merchants and merchants on Shopify to accept fast web3 native payments with no transaction fees until the end of 2023.”
Launched in February 2022, Solana Pay is built on top of Solana and the initial payment option for this integration is USDC, the second largest stablecoin by market cap. The choice of USDC, Solana Foundation's Josh Fried told TechCrunch, is strategic given its close ties to the dollar and regulatory oversight. However, he hinted at future considerations for adding SOL.
SolPay is also integrated into the Solana Saga mobile phone and is available on any device connected to the Solana wallet. The Saga's price was reduced in early August to $599 from $999 at launch.
Benefits of the Solana and Shopify partnership.
Over 11 million active accounts on Solana will potentially gain access to Shopify businesses, which, according to TechCrunch, represent 10% of total U.S. e-commerce and $444 billion of global economic activity. However, businesses will likely need to activate Solana Pay on their merchants' dashboards in order to accept payments.
Fried confirmed to TechCrunch the vital role of payments in the crypto space, stating:
“Some people claim that the killer app for cryptocurrencies hasn’t arrived yet, but it has: it’s payments.”
This sentiment reflects the hope for a shift towards decentralized payment platforms that aim to reduce business transaction costs. Credit card processing fees typically cost businesses up to 5% per transaction. In contrast, the average cost of a transaction on the Solana blockchain is one fortieth of a cent.
The partnership can also allow merchants to create loyalty programs with minimal development effort. These reward systems could be as simple as launching NFT loyalty tokens that are burned when a consumer checks out with Solana Pay, Freed says.
However, this comes amid significant changes in the crypto market as several major cryptocurrencies, including SOL, were recently delisted by Robinhood, Bitstamp and Revolut following SEC lawsuits against Coinbase and Binance.
