Helio upgrades its Solana Pay plugin for Shopify
The plugin has created $50 million in payments volume since launching
Helio and Adobe stock modified by Blockworks
Helio has made a set of upgrades to its Solana Pay Shopify plugin, the crypto payments company announced Thursday morning.
The plugin allows businesses on the e-commerce platform to accept payments via the Solana network. The plugin charges a 0.75% transaction fee, which is lower than the 1.5 to 3.5% typically charged by credit cards.
The new version of the plugin adds “hundreds” of cryptocurrencies that can be used for payments. A video of the possible cryptocurrencies shared with Blockworks included bitcoin, ether, solana, PayPal’s PYUSD, and memecoins including ORE and MOTHER. The plugin only accepted USDC previously.
Using Jupiter, merchants can automatically swap the variety of accepted coins to stablecoins.
The upgrade also lets users onramp crypto into their wallet using fiat and lets merchants offramp crypto into fiat automatically. Besides this, the upgrade creates a more streamlined checkout process and lets merchants offer features like NFT airdrops and allow lists for customers.
To be clear, Shopify itself is not assisting in the upgrades. Anyone can apply to add a plugin to the Shopify App Store. The Solana Foundation led Shopify’s initial integration with the Solana Labs-created Solana Pay in August, Helio CEO Stijn Paumen told Blockworks. Helio took over operations of the integration from the Solana Foundation in December 2023, Paumen said.
If there’s an institution-related takeaway here, it’s perhaps that PYUSD on Solana now has a payments-related use case — something PayPal had hoped for when it made the deployment in late May.
Read more: PayPal’s stablecoin goes live on Solana
Since taking over in December 2023, Helio’s Shopify plugin has seen $50 million in sales volume via partnerships with over 200 stores, the company said in a press release. Entrepreneur and anti-aging influencer Bryan Johnson is a Helio-Solana Pay customer, and Solana Labs used the plugin when soliciting preorders for the second Solana Mobile device.
Payments on Ethereum, BNB and more than 10 other blockchains are coming soon to the Shopify plugin, Paumen said.
Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:
- Blockworks Daily: The newsletter that helps thousands of investors understand crypto and the markets, by Byron Gilliam.
- Empire: Start your morning with the top news and analysis to inform your day in crypto.
- Forward Guidance: Reporting and analysis on the growing intersection of crypto and macroeconomics, policy and finance.
- 0xResearch: Alpha directly in your inbox. Market highlights, data, degen trade ideas, governance updates, token performance and more.
- Lightspeed: Built for Solana investors, developers and community members. The latest from one of crypto’s hottest networks.
- The Drop: For crypto collectors and traders, covering apps, games, memes and more.
- Supply Shock: Tracking Bitcoin’s rise from internet plaything worth less than a penny to global phenomenon disrupting money as we know it.
