E-commerce giant Shopify has added Solana Pay to its pool of options for payment, allowing millions of merchants to use the platform to accept crypto transactions, kicking off with USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin payments.
According to TechCrunch, Solana plans to add other altcoins to the platform in the coming months, including its native SOL (SOL) token and the meme token Bonk.
Josh Fried of Solana Labs branded the intersection of digital assets and payment solutions as the “killer app for crypto,” adding that everyone “should be doubling down on this.”
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.
Shopify estimates that 10% of all e-commerce transactions in the United States, or $444 billion of the world’s e-commerce market, are made through its platform. The company has gradually integrated Web3 solutions into its operations, including a suite of blockchain commerce tools for Web3-focused stores and crypto wallet connect features.
Shopify’s volume will serve as a proving ground for the Solana blockchain. In previous years, Solana struggled with reliability and uptime issues. Its co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko dubbed the issues a “curse” attributed to the network’s low-cost transactions.
Recent statistics, however, indicate that network performance is improving. According to its latest performance report, Solana has experienced 100% uptime since Feb. 25, marking an entire quarter without an outage. A single February outage saw the network knocked offline for almost 19 hours.
Launched in February 2022, Solana Pay is a peer-to-peer payment infrastructure that gives merchants the ability to accept and settle payment transactions across digital assets. The platform is a collaboration between Solana Labs, Checkout.com, Circle and Citcon, alongside wallet integrations from Phantom.
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