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The drive to achieve mainstream merchant acceptance of cryptocurrency received a boost Thursday as Shopify Inc. and DePay, a Swiss blockchain payments platform, teamed up to enable consumers to send direct payments to Shopify merchants’ wallets.
Shopify will leverage DePay’s blockchain to enable merchants to receive any preferred tokens, with automatic conversion of incoming payments to stablecoins occurring in real time. The deal is expected to spare consumers from paying a middleman to credit the merchant’s account when paying with a token. Shopify’s platform serves some 1.75 million sellers.
DePay argues that the mechanism of blockchain transactions is inherently peer-to-peer and decentralized. Nevertheless, the company says, most of today’s established crypto payment solutions manage wallets for their customers, embedding a decentralized technology into centralized structures, which results in paying a middleman to credit the merchant’s account.
By contrast, DePay says its model enables what it calls any-to-anything payment conversions. By using what has come to be known as decentralized finance, DePay says it can grow the number of crypto tokens a merchant can receive by a factor of a hundredfold.
DePay, which is blockchain-agnostic and can be extended on any blockchain-specific plugin, supports such leading blockchains and wallets as Coinbase, Ethereum, MetaMask, Ploygon, BNB, and USD Coin.
“We’re happy to welcome DePay to provide the very first integration of a wallet-to-wallet (P2P) payment solution for Shopify merchants,” Ashley Fulks, product partner manager at Shopify says in a prepared statement. “Our growing blockchain ecosystem demonstrates our commitment to supporting merchants with alternative payment methods on their storefronts, helping to further expand what’s possible in commerce.”
The adoption of cryptocurrency for payments is starting to show signs of faster growth, especially among Millennials and Gen Zers. A recent study from Checkout.com, a cloud-based payments platform, reveals that 40% of 18- to 35-year-olds are willing to pay with cryptocurrency.
