Stabledash Live · Jun 30 · 28 min

Coinbase Payments Lead on Who Actually Pays in Stablecoins and the PPRO + Checkout.com Partnerships

With Justin Gainsley

Key takeaways

Justin Gainsley says Coinbase custodies over $300 billion of customer assets and now builds stablecoin payments infrastructure after moving away from Bitcoin and meme coin spending.
New partnerships with PPRO and Checkout.com bring stablecoin acceptance to payment providers that serve household-name merchants.
Gainsley says interchange costs merchants 2 to 5% per transaction, and that stablecoins can cut cross-border treasury moves from weeks to seconds.

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Summary

Coinbase's payments lead says the company is following stablecoin holders to checkout and putting cross-border merchants first, where card fees and FX costs hurt most.

Justin Gainsley, payments product lead at Coinbase, says the company custodies over $300 billion of customer assets and is using that position to expand stablecoin acceptance at checkout. He says partnerships with PPRO and Checkout.com extend that acceptance to enterprise merchants.

From Bitcoin to stablecoins

Justin Gainsley says Coinbase's payments work started with spending Bitcoin, moved to every asset and network, then meme coins, before it pivoted to stablecoin payments infrastructure. The business now goes by Coinbase Payments, which he calls a fairly new name.

He says over 150 million people hold stablecoins, and over half of the people using the product have no other assets in their wallet. Because it is extremely hard to change payer behavior, he says, following where those 150 million people already are has worked best. He points to Cash App, which he says has around 30 million consumers who want to pay with it.

“The people we're talking to right now are gonna knock your socks off a year from now. And that's just what it takes. In in the enterprise world, it takes a while to get it going.”

Justin Gainsley

Reaching merchants through providers

Justin Gainsley says PPRO and Checkout.com provide payment functionality to many household names. Under Coinbase Direct accounts, a provider like PPRO can create subaccounts for each of its merchants. Coinbase also offers crypto-as-a-service, which lets PNC sell white-labeled trading and stablecoin holdings with Coinbase custody under the hood.

The cost of interchange

Justin Gainsley says interchange can cost merchants 2 to 5% per transaction, and more on foreign transactions. Host Drew Rogers cited a $5.5 billion Mastercard and Visa settlement in the US over overcharged interchange fees. Gainsley says stablecoins let a business accept a payment and move it back to any entity in seconds without foreign transaction fees.

He calls emerging-market payment pain a shark bite next to the mosquito bite of US friction. He says Coinbase works with Shopify on stablecoin checkout and merchant accounts, and that Shopify can operate in about 120 markets, leaving out 80 countries.

Trust as an advantage

Justin Gainsley calls Coinbase the most trusted brand in crypto and says being a publicly traded S&P 500 company lets it work with firms like BlackRock. He notes that crypto has a notorious hack on blockchain contracts probably every six months.

Justin Gainsley expects stablecoins to become the rail that solves much of US payment pain, probably hidden under the hood. He says enterprise adoption takes time, and that the companies Coinbase is talking to now will knock your socks off a year from now.

Coinbase, PPRO, Adobe, and Cash App come up most.

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