BaseCamp 2025 — Making Onchain Payments Work for Everyone

Hello everyone. Thank you for coming to our session today. To get us started, how we're thinking about the session is meant to bring us together and talk about what is required to bring onchain payments to everyone. Right now, we can use them. We have the base app.

We're cryptofamiliar. That's why we're here, but not everyone in the world is on chain yet. So, what what does that gap look like? And so to start, we want we want to just orient people on why onchain payments matter, what the history of the space has been like, what solutions we offer today, and what we're trying to do right now to bring the world onchain, and really orient the most of the time though about where we're going. What are the things that we still need to solve?

And that actually largely is informed by you, the builders, whatever problems you're facing on your frontier, how you want to accept payments for your app. We want to have those discussions and learn from you uh as much as you're learning from us. Hopefully we learn a lot more from you. But uh that's what we have in mind for today. Hope that's of interest.

So the first step, why are we onchain at all? Onchain is useful for a lot of things. Uh specifically for payments, these are the four characteristics we think are most important. The first would be faster. So when you transact on chain, you're not using old legacy corruptive spreadsheets and bank tellers, etc.

It's on software native and it's on a distributed ledger. So when you transact on chain, you get faster payments. On base, that's as fast as 200 milliseconds. You don't need to wait for end of day payments for credit cards or the concept of business days. In the traditional payments world, payments onchain are also cheaper.

With Bass, you don't pay any fee that scales with a payment. You pay a transaction fee that's the same that everyone else is trying to submit transactions for, whether they're buying an NFT, a content coin, or doing something else entirely. So, base transactions right now, we're proud to say that we our median fee is less than 1 cent. Uh this is you'd say an order of magnitude cheaper than credit cards which default charge 30 cents plus some percentage based things like 30 cents and 3% on base. It's just simply less than a cent flap.

Onchain payments are also global. You don't just have to work within the swift or the US like bank system. Everything is connected to the same distributed ledger and you can access it with anywhere with an internet connection. This is important not just for interconnectivity but really allowing people to access the same global economy. Right?

So I can buy things in America as an American. I can buy things in Europe as a European. But if I'm in a place that's not connected to those real financial hubs, I don't have access to the same products and opportunities as those people within global. It's not just making it possible to buy those things, but I'm getting access to the same network that everyone else is playing in. It's a more positive sum game for everyone hopefully.

And then the final piece is composable. This is new tech and the data is public and the standards are open. It's encouraging for people to build on a shared layer and we can move faster together. And so composability could be as simple as we're just looking at the same event feed of all the transactions that are coming in and share that more easily. It could also mean we're building new onchain primitives that allow me to embed payments with other important actions I want to do such as rewards or uh attribution or other things of that nature.

So let's talk a little bit about where we've been. What is the history of onchain payments? And it's there's so many things that have happened, but we boil them down into five key phases uh or or or events really. Um, the first really starts with the stable coin USDC. And it was not the first stable coin, but we think it's the most important for realizing onchain payments in this time period because it's the first one that's demonstrated reliability over multiple market cycles and has always been a compliant first option spearheading in the US markets.

And so compliance is also really important because that's what's blocking a lot of traditional institutions from onboarding stables as well. The next thing that happened is base uh or L2s as a broad movement on the EVM. cheap, fast block space actually make the transaction fees cheaper than traditional networks. The smart wallet was our approach to enabling safe, easy, and a web native account. And that web native, it's actually kind of subtle, but it's funny enough for the Shopify, the next big mark here, it was actually a critical piece in what led Shopify to want to go on chain.

Finally, there was access to stable coins that people would want to accept versus Bitcoin or other esoteric currencies. The block space was cheap enough. users would be have able to access it, but they could access it on a web native interface, which is a large portion of where payments come in today. And so, Shopify being the fourth key pillar here, it's our first step in global merchant distribution. Payments are inherently a network.

It has the same cold start problems as other networks like social apps. If I have USDC, that's great, but if I can't buy it at my local coffee shop, I can't buy it when I buy goods online. It's not that helpful of a payment system actually. So for us, bootstrapping the network, Shopify is actually the single largest payment orchestrator involved in that flow that we could possibly onboard. So to have them onchain is also a key step here.

And then finally, the base app. Most recently, we have now we're bootstrapping the merchant side. We're trying to bootstrap now the consumer side. And we think the best way to bring consumers onchain is through viral social experiences. And that's why we've leaned so heavily into the base app and social.

Next to cover a little bit about where we are. How are we actually empowering onchain payments today? And we've split this down into two different personas uh for you in the audience. Either we're going to categorize you as like a business, you're just trying to sell things online onchain and you want to get paid and developers who are building products maybe for themselves or for others. So for businesses, we have three main ways we've observed people accepting onchain payments so far.

The simplest is actually just using the base app. So this is really great for cash heavy businesses. If you've ever been to maybe your hair stylist or a cafe and they accept Venmo where they accept cash, we want to be a place to insert base app as well as another payment method where I can just install an app. I don't have to do any KYC and I can carry that money with me wherever I go. I can connect it to my Coinbase account and off-ramp or do any other things I want with it.

The next key thing we're seeing is Shopify. Of course, this is the endto-end merchant solution. It's superpowered. It has all the inventory management, the distribution of like a website, and then it also has easy ways to build my storefront and try to convert users, offer promos, etc., and tap into the ecosystem of other apps, too.

And then finally, Coinbase Business is a new venture within Coinbase. It's in private beta right now, but it's your complete onchain business experience. So, you can hold stables, you can easily on and off ramp with your connected bank account, but you can also buy and trade crypto. You can build your own Bitcoin reserve in your mom and pop shop now. It's a crazy thing.

uh and you can do more future of onchain payment things. So for example uh I used to run a software company. We wouldn't settle we wouldn't sell any goods but we would sell invoices effectively where we we would use stripe to say pay my um ask my customers for my monthly payment. I can do that on Coinbase business with a payment link solution for developers. We have three key offerings emerging right now.

The first and the one we'll talk about most today is called Base Pay and the SDK that makes simple payments possible on any application. It's only one payment option. It uses the base account that's powering the base app. Um, but the simplicity we think brings a lot of clarity for users and it's the fastest experience because of that. Second thing we have to offer is Coinbase developer platform.

We have some members from CDP here at Basecamp and it's giving you the full wall compatibility. You get a full picker. Wall connects you to hundreds of other wallets and it's also an APIdriven processing solution. So that way you can combine a lot of other things you're doing server side with your application that is a more powerful and robust platform. And then finally the commerce protocol.

This is actually what's backing Shopify's onchain payments right now. It's new smart contracts that are permissionless, immutable, and extensible that allow anyone to directly facilitate onchain payments with anything else they want to do on chain. So, it's the most customized and advanced solution we have today. Um, and if you have questions about it, I'm here as the author to help address them. Now, we want to talk about base.

What does this premier solution look like to actually bring consumers on board? And here we have Arjun, one of the developers.

All right, let's talk about base pay. So, Base Pay is the fastest way to pay with USDC for pretty much anything on the web, from digital services to subscriptions to even real life things from Shopify, for example. Base Pay lets you check out directly with your base account in just one click without having to do any of the wallet connection stuff. And as a developer, using the base Pay SDK, you can add it to your store in just a few lines of code. And we'll be showing you that a little bit later.

Back to Connor for base pay for consumers. So, why do consumers care about base pay? They could choose to pay with anything in the future. Uh, right now they have credit cards or Apple Pay. Why would we why as a why as a consumer would I choose something else?

We have three things that we're trying to lean into right now. Um, first is has to be seamless. The standard is so high. Apple Pay is just double click, scan my face, and I'm done. That is the bar we're aiming for, and we're not exactly there yet, but we're pretty close.

We also use pass keys, so we hook into Face ID natively. And within crypto, it is really the fastest payment experience. There's no connection and then a payment. I don't have to click more than once, and I'm only shown exactly what I need to see. I don't have a concept of gas.

I don't have a concept of uh other tokens other than the one I'm paying with, which is the dollar. And so, we think that getting out of the way of users completing their payment is a principle that will keep us on the path towards competing truly with existing payment solutions. Uh the second is that it's limitless. This is where we really diverge from the status quo. There's no minimum or maximum value you can send in a payment.

This is different than today where when I go to the gas station, I just want to buy a stick of gum. I have to buy a drink and two other things just to get the credit card fee to like be worthwhile for the merchant. We don't have that anymore. Um similarly for maximum payments, when I try to pay rent, I have to send like a few thousand. I can't do that from my bank.

I'm limited at $500 a day and I have money. So I'm like, why do I have to do this? um the money is not really mine if I can't use it freely. And so removing those restrictions is a key part of why we think people want to be onchain and want to have self-custody. And then third, it's global.

So when I travel, it's way easier for me to swap in the base app and get my currency without avoiding the atrocious fees at the airport or elsewhere. So I can natively pay people across the world more easily if I have family who do not live in the States. Um and so that global connection is also about building the global economy. So, why do we think businesses will want base pay? Simply, they just earn more and they get paid faster.

Very easy. I earn more because I don't have as many fees coming into uh taking a whole lot of my business. I think this is actually very pronounced for businesses that are low margin. So, as an example, let's say my business operates at a 10% margin. If I pay 1% less on fees on my revenue, I actually take home 10% more in profits.

There's a big multiplier there. And so for businesses like restaurants that are very low margin, this actually has way more potential to easily put pockets back into the people creating value. Second, I get paid faster. In the traditional commerce world, there are things like chargebacks and cash flow issues that make it actually an impediment for me as a business to operate if I'm not getting my money when I need it. So by having instant settlement and avoiding mechanisms like chargebacks, we actually put a lot of uh power back into merchants to get paid when they need to get paid.

And now for developers, base pay allows you to accept stable coins by default. So all transactions through base pay are using USDC for both the users and the merchants. And we have a premier user experience as well with just one click and no complicated user flows. It's also a very fast integration. So when you're using the base pay SDK, as I said before, it's just a few lines of code.

There's no confusing API keys or any wallet connections you have to deal with. And then finally, base pay is feature complete. So, not only can you accept simple USDC payments, but you can also accept subscriptions and also you can get user information and you can use um embedded on-ramps. So, let's talk a little bit about where we're going. Um, base pay is feature complete, but it's not the most complete it could be.

Uh, we have lots of things to do still. Uh, lots of things you're probably aware of if you've used Bay and other crypto apps in the past. So, this is just a short list of things that came to mind, but point of sale is a big thing to bring payments into the real world. We don't really have the tap to pay experience that we want. Uh, local stable coins, we have USDC, but we don't have the long tail of everyone else who exists in the world who doesn't transact on the dollar.

Off-ramping is still maybe a problem for some merchants. They have to onboard to another solution. Base pay itself is a consumer product. We still need to pair it with something else. Uh, privacy, everything is still on chain and using ERC20 transfers.

You can see where the money is coming from and going to. And there are some clever tricks we can do to obscure that. But there's still a lot more privacy work to be done uh compared to off-chain payments. Uh rewards and affiliates. How do we actually make this economy work for everyone?

Not just the buyer and the merchant, but other people are involved in making sure things get bought. Influencers on social media will will have relationships with merchants to direct traffic to their store. How do we recreate those mechanisms in the way that maintain uh the properties of cheap and fast and globally accessible? And then finally, verified identity. How do we actually know who we're transacting with?

How do we know that they're people that we want to be on our stores or buying from us? A lot of work to be done, but that concludes the presentation component. So, thank you. [Applause]