Coinbase Commerce Removes Native Bitcoin Payment Support for Merchants – What’s Going On?
Coinbase has removed support for native Bitcoin (BTC) and other UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output) coins on its payment platform for merchants, Coinbase Commerce.
In a recent post on X, Lauren Dowling, the exchange’s head of product, said that the removal of native Bitcoin and UTXO support was driven by challenges in delivering recent updates on Coinbase Commerce’s EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) payment protocol for Bitcoin.
The new Commerce product focuses on enforcing payment details on-chain and supports a wide range of assets, including native and ERC-20 tokens.
It also automatically converts payments to USDC (USD Coin) on-chain at a guaranteed rate for merchants.
However, providing the same capabilities on the Bitcoin blockchain without smart contracts and stablecoins posed significant challenges, leading to the removal of native Bitcoin and UTXO support, Dowling said.
“Delivering these same capabilities on the Bitcoin blockchain without smart contracts and stablecoins was challenging & we therefore made the difficult decision to remove native Bitcoin & other UTXO support.”
Although Coinbase Commerce will no longer directly support Bitcoin transactions for merchants, CEO Brian Armstrong clarified that customers using Coinbase accounts can still use Bitcoin as a payment option.
He also mentioned that Coinbase is working on integrating the Lightning Network, a layer-two scaling solution for Bitcoin, into its platform.
This integration could potentially open up opportunities for Lightning Network-based commerce payments in the future.
Armstrong further emphasized that the mainstream adoption of crypto payments is contingent on moving away from layer-one solutions (the base blockchain) to reduce transaction fees and
