Coinbase Commerce, the merchant arm of the San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange, revealed that it has achieved the double milestone of $200 million in transactions as well as has crossed 8,000 integrated retailers.
Commerce product lead John Zettler told CoinDesk that activity in its retailers' network wasn't impacted by the chaos triggered by the novel coronavirus. He also confirmed that Bitcoin remains the most preferred coin within the service that allows merchants to accept multiple Cryptocurrencies directly into a user-controlled wallet.
"Merchant customers often tell us it's the crypto they're most familiar with and the one they trust the most," he said.
A few years after it arrived on the scene amidst claims it would take on fiat currencies and revolutionize Payments , Zettler said stablecoins are also taking a bigger market share. He added that stablecoins, particularly its own dollar-pegged USDC, offer regular sellers a low-friction avenue to add cryptocurrency payments to their checkout and e-commerce business. So the metrics and growth prospects stand to further its position in both crypto and traditional markets by bridging the worlds.
USDC strengthens its dominance
Coinbase has been trying to increase the adoption of the US dollar-pegged stablecoin that popped up somewhere in the middle of 2018. Coinbase has also boosted USDC dominance by making it the only way to convert fiat to crypto without fees on its institutional platform, Coinbase Pro.
USDC has widened its percentage of total stablecoin supply in circulation to over 10 percent. The gains come as Tether conceded its dominance to other alternatives, including Circle's coin, Paxos Standard, and the Gemini Dollar. The most controversial cryptocurrency saw its market share falling to below 70 percent, compared with over 95 percent in 2018. At the beginning of 2018, the coin had control over the entire stablecoin ecosystem.
Coinbase's own USDC coin in circulation hit more $1 billion and is currently the world's second-largest stablecoin. The dollar-backed token was created by both Coinbase and Goldman-funded startup Circle.
