February 23, 2024
By Anjali Kocchar
As per Cointelegraph, Coinbase has eliminated support for more UTXO tokens and native Bitcoin (BTC) from Coinbase Commerce, an online platform that helps with merchant payments.
According to Cointelegraph, Lauren Dowling, Head of Product at Coinbase, confirmed the news. The company “made the difficult decision to remove native Bitcoin & other UTXO support” from Coinbase Commerce, according to Dowling, due to problems distributing the most recent iterations of its BTC-focused EVM payment mechanism.
The new Commerce product automatically converts payments to USDC on-chain at a guaranteed rate to merchants, enforces the specifics of each payment on-chain, and supports hundreds of assets (native and ERC-20s). The company had to make the painful choice to discontinue native support for Bitcoin and other UTXOs since it was challenging to provide these same features on the Bitcoin blockchain without smart contracts and stablecoins, according to Dowling.
Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, emphasized that users of Coinbase Commerce will still be able to use Bitcoin as long as they have an account with the company, based on data from Cointelegraph. It’s thought that Coinbase wants to finish integrating Lightning Network. Armstrong hoped there might be chances to use Lightning to make payments for goods and services in the future.
Furthermore, as reported by Cointelegraph, the proposal to ban Bitcoin caused a social media response from the entire community, with users hinting at the potential effects of adopting Bitcoin. Is it presumed that every customer wants a Coinbase account and that they are in the US and capable of opening one? That’s equivalent to mandating that all customers must be Bank of America customers for businesses that merely bank with BofA to accept payments, said a user going by pseudonym.
About the author
Anjali Kochhar covers cryptocurrency stories in India as well as globally. Having been in the field of media and journalism for over three years now, she has developed a sharp news sense and works hard to present information that goes beyond the obvious. She is an avid reader and loves writing on a wide range of subjects.
