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Consumers will soon have the option to buy anything from Shopify-powered merchants with Circle’s USDC stablecoin on Coinbase’s layer-2 network Base, thanks to a new collaboration between Shopify and Coinbase.
The feature will start in early access today and roll out to all merchants throughout the year, according to Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke.
“We think that stablecoins are a natural way to transact on the internet and worked with Coinbase to develop the commerce payment protocol smart contract that powers this work,” Lutke posted on X (formerly Twitter).
The Shopify frontman joined Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong onstage at the 2025 Coinbase State of Crypto Summit on Thursday afternoon to break the news, telling the audience that Shopify is “extremely aligned with everything crypto stands for.”
“Buyers coming to Shopify stores will see a USDC on Base payment option, and they’ll be able to use it in the same way as anything else,” Lutke said on Thursday.
“Pay with crypto”
Millions of @Shopify stores are about to accept USDC on Base. Pay with USDC, get 1% back.
The onchain internet just got its checkout button. https://t.co/YoVcWf7ob3 pic.twitter.com/Poj7IJIcbo
— Base (@base) June 12, 2025
Previously, shoppers could use crypto to pay Shopify merchants via plugins like Solana Pay or Coinbase Commerce, but in the future, the option to pay with USDC on Base will automatically be present.
To power the new commerce experience, the pair collaborated alongside payments giant Stripe, and built a permissionless payments protocol and smart contracts to help handle more complicated payment mechanics.
“What we did is build a smart contract that models this sort of complex state machine of taking the escrow money and then releasing it to the merchant if the transaction finally happens,” Lutke said.
Called the Commerce Payments Protocol, the open-source protocol makes necessary improvements to commerce payments that previously didn’t exist.
“On-chain payments have worked for peer-to-peer transactions, but not for more complex commerce purchases which require a multi-stage payment commitment process,” posted Base software engineer Conner Swenberg on X.
“For example, merchants can run out of inventory and need to cancel a purchase, buyers can request refunds, orders may be completed in multiple deliveries, and more," he added. :The Commerce Payments Protocol fills this gap to enable on-chain commerce at scale.”
The protocol now will enable merchants to enable buyer incentives as well, like providing 1% cash back on purchases.
This work will also allow us to offer buyer incentives like 1% cash back in the future. And it’s all transparent to merchants, they will simply get normal local currency payouts the same as usual (unless you choose to keep it as USDC!). Stripe helped us make this totally seamless
— tobi lutke (@tobi) June 12, 2025
“The big takeaway from my point of view is that for the first time, this is a large-scale ecommerce platform adopting crypto payments, and it just shows that crypto is updating the financial system,” said Armstrong.
Shopify previously added Solana Pay in 2023, allowing payment in USDC on Solana. That plugin got a major upgrade last year, opening the door to payments with hundreds of different assets from the Solana blockchain.
Its collaborator, Stripe, has been intertwining itself with crypto heavily of late, announcing an acquisition to acquire wallet infrastructure company Privy on Wednesday and adding stablecoin payments platform Bridge for $1.1 billion in October.
Circle, the stablecoin issuer of USDC, last week held its initial public offering (IPO) for $31 a share. Shares had more than quadrupled in price by Monday, and closed Thursday at $106.54—still up sizably from the offering price.
Shares in both Shopify and Coinbase dropped around 4% on Thursday.
Edited by James Rubin