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Shopify to Roll Out USDC Stablecoin Payments on Base in Coinbase Team-Up

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In brief

  • Coinbase and Shopify partnered to advance stablecoins in ecommerce.
  • Early access for USDC payments on Base is now live for select merchants, rolling out more broadly throughout the year.
  • The pair also collaborated with payments giant Stripe to build an open source payment protocol.

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. 

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

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The EPA Wants to Roll Back Emissions Controls on Power Plants
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The EPA Wants to Roll Back Emissions Controls on Power Plants

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The US Environmental Protection Agency moved to roll back emissions standards for power plants, the second-largest source of CO2 emissions in the country, on Wednesday, claiming that the American power sector does not “contribute significantly” to air pollution.

“The bottom line is that the EPA is trying to get out of the climate change business,” says Ryan Maher, a staff attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity.

The announcement comes just days after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) quietly released record-breaking new figures showing the highest seasonal concentration of CO2 in recorded history.

In a press conference on Tuesday, flanked by legislators from some of the country’s top fossil-fuel-producing states, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin accused both the Obama and Biden administrations of “seeking to suffocate our economy in order to protect the environment.” Zeldin singled out data centers as helping to drive unprecedented demand in the US power sector over the next decade. The EPA, he said, is “taking actions to end the agency’s war on so much of our US domestic energy supply.”

The proposed EPA rollbacks target a suite of rules on the power plant sector put in place last year by the Biden administration. Those regulations mandated that coal- and gas-fired power plants reduce their emissions by 90 percent by the early 2030s, primarily by using carbon capture and storage technology.

Among a swath of justifications for rolling back regulations, the proposed new EPA rule argues that because US power sector emissions accounted for only 3 percent of global emissions in 2022 —down from 5.5 percent in 2005—and because coal use from other countries continues to grow, US electricity generation from fossil fuel “does not contribute significantly to globally elevated concentrations of GHGs in the atmosphere.” However, electric power generation was responsible for 25 percent of US emissions in 2022, according to the EPA, making it second only to transportation among the dirtiest sectors of the economy. An NYU analysis published earlier this month found that if the US power sector were its own separate country, it would be the sixth-largest emitter in the world.

“This action would be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high,” says Meredith Hankins, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The EPA is also targeting the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) rule, which mandates that power plants maintain controls to reduce the amount of mercury and other toxic air pollutants emitted from their plants. The Biden administration in 2024 strengthened those standards, which date to 2011. Despite progress in reducing mercury emissions since the MATS rule was initially implemented, coal-fired power plants are still the largest source of mercury emissions in the US.

The administration has also made it clear that it intends to try to revive the coal industry, which has been on a steep decline since the rise of cheap natural gas and renewables in the 2010s. In a series of executive orders issued in April intended to boost the industry, President Trump tied the future of AI dominance in the US to extending a lifeline to coal.



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Elon Musk To Roll Out Xchat With Bitcoin Style Encryption
Crypto Trends

Elon Musk to Roll Out XChat With Bitcoin Style Encryption

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Tech billionaire Elon Musk has just announced a brand-new messaging app called XChat.  What makes XChat different is how it’s built with inspiration from bitcoin developer Satoshi Nakamoto for security measures.

Musk says the app uses a programming language called Rust, and its security system is based on how Bitcoin works.

According to Musk, this app is designed to be super secure. It will have end-to-end encryption, disappearing messages, and the ability to send any kind of file.

“You can do audio/video calls without a phone number across all platforms,” Musk said in a follow-up post.

Source | X

When asked to Musk’s own AI agent grok to compare XChat with existing platforms like telegram and signal it replied:

“XChat, Signal, and Telegram differ in features and security. XChat, recently announced, offers end-to-end encryption, vanishing messages, and X integration, but its beta status and lack of audits raise doubts. Signal provides default end-to-end encryption and minimal data collection, ideal for privacy but lacks advanced features. Telegram supports large groups and bots, but only Secret Chats are encrypted, with metadata collection concerns. Choose Signal for security, Telegram for versatility, or XChat for X users, though its unproven security warrants caution.”

Amid this announcement bitcoin is trading at price of $104,492 with losing interest among traders as volume has dropped by 17%.

Also Read: Elon Musk’s Tesla to Buy $3 Billion in Bitcoin: Fact Check





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Santander’s Crypto Ambitions: Spain’s Top Bank To Roll Out Stablecoin

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Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure

Banco Santander SA, one of the largest banks in Europe and Spain, is reportedly considering introducing its own stablecoin. The bank also plans to give its digital banking arm, Openbank, the ability to offer crypto services to retail clients.

According to a Bloomberg report from May 29, the Spanish bank’s online unit has applied for licenses to operate these services under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation.

Euro And Dollar Stablecoins For Retail Clients

While Santander has not officially commented on the report, Bloomberg sources reportedly indicate that the bank is evaluating the launch of euro- and dollar-denominated stablecoins. This could involve creating its own stablecoin or facilitating access to existing ones. 

Santander’s Openbank, which serves customers across multiple European countries, is poised to launch these crypto services as early as this year, contingent on obtaining the necessary regulatory approvals, according to Bloomberg.

This move comes as Santander’s Spanish competitor, BBVA SA, announced in March its intention to offer cryptocurrency services following approval from Spain’s regulatory authority, the CNMV. 

BBVA has already been providing similar services in Switzerland and Turkey, allowing customers to buy, sell, and manage transactions in Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) through their app. 

How BBVA Aims To Guide Customers In Crypto Assets

Gonzalo Rodríguez, BBVA’s head of retail banking in Spain, emphasized the bank’s commitment to making cryptocurrency investment accessible, stating, “Our goal is to guide them as they explore this new segment of digital assets, backed by the solvency and security assurances provided by a bank like BBVA.”

The MiCA regulation aims to harmonize the currently fragmented regulatory landscape across the European Union’s (EU) 27 member states. 

By establishing a comprehensive framework, the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets is shaping how major digital market participants operate within one of the world’s largest economic regions. 

The regulation allows banks, investment firms, and other financial institutions to engage in cryptocurrency activities, provided they have the necessary authorization under the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) II.

Such a move comes in the wake of growing legislative support in the US led by President Donald Trump, who has increasingly changed its previous vision about digital assets and Bitcoin with major announcements, including the establishment of a Strategic Crypto Reserve.

As such, Bitcoin reached a new record high of $111,800 last week, with analysts and investors vowing to see even greater gains in the coming months. 

The daily chart shows the market’s total valuation. Source: TOTAL on TradingView.com

Consequently, the total crypto market capitalization reached a new high of $3.5 trillion last week, now standing at $3.3 trillion as investors flock to cash out their gains. 

Featured image from DALL-E, chart from TradingView.com 

Editorial Process for bitcoinist is centered on delivering thoroughly researched, accurate, and unbiased content. We uphold strict sourcing standards, and each page undergoes diligent review by our team of top technology experts and seasoned editors. This process ensures the integrity, relevance, and value of our content for our readers.



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