By
Temitope Olatunji
April 18th, 2024
The new Coinbase Commerce button will be integrated on merchant websites and used by customers to make payment from four different crypto options.
One of the largest cryptocurrency exchange of the U.S and also the world – Coinbase – was on a roll last year. Following the crypto mania of the last year, Coinbase received a whopping 14 million registrations and managed to clock $1 billion in revenue, thereby beating its revenue forecast estimates by 66%.
In a further drive to make its exchange more customer and user-friendly, the cryptocurrency exchange has recently launched a new service for merchants which allows them to seamlessly integrate digital payments with cryptos by adding a Coinbase Commerce button. Anyone who has the idea or has used the PayPal button previously will understand this new integration quickly.
Not much has been talked regarding this by the exchange itself at the moment. A bare website states that they are still not ready for the new sign-ups, but reports are that some merchants have already started using this services. During the checkout process on the merchant websites that have integrated Coinbase Commerce, users can now select to pay through this new mode and make the payment using any of the four cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin.
The new Coinbase Commerce Button is said to have dedicated some features for supporting the Ethereum ecosystem. Moreover, it is being also said that the Commerce button will now also be integrated with MetaMask, an Ethereum browser plugin. The MetaMask interface is somewhat different from the centralized wallets which allow users to connect to their own ETH node or use Metamask’s Infura node provider.
This makes it completely decentralized and remains on the blockchain and the free extension acts as a wallet sitting on the top of your browser. With sufficient funds in your wallet, the payment process is pretty simple with just a one confirmation click. In case you don’t have enough funds, you can buy ETH either through Shapeshift or Coinbase which is present on the interface itself.
It is being said that Coinbase Commerce will have the same 1% fee model, which it has implied for withdrawing the cryptos to fiat currencies in your bank account. This will make Coinbase very competitive with other alternatives in the market like PayPal which has a fee structure and charge of 2-3% with an additional 0.30 cents on every transaction.
Currently one of the major issues that the crypto market is the issue of scalability. with too many players on the Bitcoin blockchain, recently, there have been increasing reports of delayed transactions, slow speeds and increased costs. This will be a major challenge for the merchants integrating the Coinbase Commerce service as customers might have to wait for their order confirmation, unlike the instant confirmation one gets today by making payments through credit cards.
However, this move by Coinbase is certainly an important push forward to bring cryptos in the mainstream financial system.