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Solana Mobile, Solana Labs’ smartphone subsidiary, processed over $20 million in payments in alliance with Shopify and USDC, the second-largest dollar-pegged stablecoin. Anatoly Yakovenko, a co-founder of Solana Labs, explained that 51% of Chapter 2’s payments were completed using USDC, with no payment processing fees associated.
Solana Mobile, the Solana Labs’ subsidiary tasked with designing and producing Chapter 2, the upcoming Solana phone, received over $20 million in USDC payments without incurring processing fees during the phone’s pre-order process. Anatoly Yakovenko, a co-founder of Solana Labs, explained this was possible using Shopify, which offers different plugins for building an e-store and processing cryptocurrency payments directly with Solana Pay.
Yakovenko stated that while there was the option of paying with credit cards for Chapter 2, which recently reached the 100k pre-order milestone, 51% of the customers opted for using USDC, a dollar-pegged stablecoin. “The crypto payments revolution is happening,” he stressed.
He compared the cost of processing these stablecoin payments with the costs of processing the other 49% of the payments that were completed using credit cards. Yakovenko declared:
The credit card sales cost us over $600k in fees on about the same volume. That’s 3 full-time engineers.
Yakovenko is not the only one who has presented cryptocurrency as an alternative for saving money for users and companies accepting payments. In a recent report, Coinbase, a U.S. headquartered exchange, concluded that Americans could have saved at least $74 billion using crypto as payment tools instead of credit cards in 2022.
During the same period, merchants paid fees of $126 billion to process these credit card transactions, which would be negligible when using cryptocurrency. Also, using credit cards presents some disadvantages to merchants, who wait up to 4 days to have the money in their accounts, excluding weekends and holidays, while crypto can be available almost immediately.
