- Solana’s premiere payment tool, Solana Pay, has integrated with one of the largest e-commerce platforms.
- With the integration, it gives millions of merchants access to cryptocurrencies.
- Solana is also considering adding other digital assets, including SOL and BONK.
Shopify, a dominant giant in the e-commerce sector, has integrated Solana Pay into its array of payment alternatives. With the integration, users can connect Solana-centric crypto wallets, like Phantom, and settle payments on-chain with merchants using USDC.
Solana Foundation Head of Commerce Business Development Josh Fried said in a statement that:
“Solana Pay on Shopify opens up millions of merchants to a more dynamic and efficient payment choice, while consumers get the convenience and increased utility of being able to pay for goods and services with digital dollar currencies from the vast network of merchants using Shopify.”
According to Fried, Solana Pay can drastically reduce transaction costs compared with credit card processing fees. The network’s average charge is $0.00025 per transaction, while credit card processing fees range from 1.5% to 3.5%. In the last epoch, Solana’s users paid an average transaction fee of 0.000009664 SOL.
According to TechCrunch, the initial payment gateway for this Shopify integration will be USD Coin, a stablecoin with a market cap of $25.9 billion. This strategic selection aims to attract merchants more inclined to accept payment options closely aligned with the US dollar.
Solana is reportedly also considering the prospective addition of other digital assets, including SOL and BONK, a Solana meme coin.
On the other hand, Shopify has facilitated over $444 billion in economic activity and is available in 170 countries, according to the platform’s website. The firm has made other moves into Web3, such as allowing merchants to add NFT-based loyalty rewards and to sell NFTs directly to customers.
As such, Shopify’s volume will be a proving ground for the Solana blockchain. In previous years, Solana struggled with reliability and uptime issues. However, the platform’s co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has dubbed the issue a curse attributed to the network’s low-cost transactions.
Recent statistics show that the network’s performance is taking a positive shift. According to its latest performance report, Solana has experienced 100% uptime since Feb. 25, marking an entire quarter without an outage.
Solana Pay Ecosystem
Introduced last year, Solana Pay is engineered to facilitate dollar-pegged stablecoin transactions for vendors and shoppers. The platform is tailored for online and point-of-sale transactions. It can handle any volume of digital dollar transfers on Solana’s blockchain.
The Solana ecosystem has over 11.5 million active users, with an average transaction cost of $0.00025. Major crypto entities like Circle and Phantom and payment processors such as Checkout.com and Citcon have embraced Solana Pay.
Solana projects like MonkeDAO, MadLads, Helius, and Solana’s merch store have also incorporated Solana Pay into their Shopify-operated online shops.
