Big Tech’s fever for stablecoins won’t stop. The e-commerce giant Shopify announced Thursday that it was rolling out stablecoin payments to all users on its platform later this year in its largest crypto play yet.

The publicly traded tech company lets merchants—including vintage clothes sellers, cosmetics businesses, and electronics companies—set up their own online marketplaces. By late June, Shopify will let a select group of users accept payments in USDC, a stablecoin issued by the crypto company Circle, which recently had one of the year’s hottest IPOs. 

“In our own philosophical framework, we are extremely aligned with everything that crypto stands for,” Tobias Lütke, the CEO of Shopify and a Coinbase board member, said on stage at a Coinbase conference on Thursday.

Shopify will then gradually expand access to merchants across its network in the U.S. and Europe before opening up stablecoin payments to every merchant who uses its platform. The e-commerce company worked with Coinbase to develop a payments protocol to handle chargebacks, refunds, and the other intricacies of retail payments on Coinbase’s blockchain, Base. It also collaborated with fintech giant Stripe, one of Shopify’s payments processors, to integrate stablecoins into the e-commerce company’s existing software stack.

“I think other payment processors will look at what Shopify is building and be like holy crap,” Jesse Pollak, a Coinbase executive who oversees the crypto exchange’s wallet and blockchain divisions, told Fortune. 

Stablecoin buzz

Shopify’s plunge into crypto comes as stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies pegged to assets like the U.S. dollar, become one of the buzziest sectors outside of AI in Silicon Valley. Rather than wait days for a bank wire to clear, advocates say that stablecoins reduce cross-border transfer fees and speed up transactions.

Tech giants like Meta, Apple, X, Airbnb, and Google have taken notice and have all been in talks with crypto companies to explore stablecoin integrations. Moreover, the Senate is poised to pass legislation that regulates the crypto assets. And Stripe has acquired two crypto startups in the past year as it looks to carve out its own crypto payments strategy.

“This will be the beginning of a lot of dominos falling,” Pollak, the Coinbase executive, told Fortune, in reference to Shopify’s own stablecoin play.

That being said, this isn’t the first time the publicly traded e-commerce company has dipped its toes into crypto. Shopify, headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, has long let third-party software developers like Crypto.com and Strike provide plugins for merchants to accept cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and even USDC for payment.

However, these integrations came from developers outside of Shopify and were opt-in, meaning that merchants had to explicitly choose to integrate crypto payments into their online marketplaces.

Shopify’s most recent stablecoin play is opt-out. Merchants will have to adjust their settings to not accept payments in USDC, a Coinbase spokesperson told Fortune. Moreover, the payments protocol Coinbase developed with Shopify is the product of executives and developers from both companies collaborating over the past nine months, Pollak said. 

Shopify will give merchants who accept USDC up to 0.5% cash back in the U.S. and other countries, and it plans to also give customers who decide to pay with USDC an unspecified percentage of cash back later this year. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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• The S&P 500 posted a 0.27% decline on Wednesday as investors weighed Trump’s scant-on-details trade deal with China as well as an inflation report that outperformed analysts’ expectations.

The stock markets dropped on Wednesday despite a seemingly positive development in the trade war between the U.S. and China alongside a better-than-expected inflation report for May. The S&P 500 dipped 0.27%, the Nasdaq fell 0.50%, and the Dow Jones closed the day essentially flat.

“OUR DEAL WITH CHINA IS DONE, SUBJECT TO FINAL APPROVAL WITH PRESIDENT XI AND ME,” President Donald Trump posted Wednesday morning on his social media platform Truth Social, referring to President Xi Jinping of China.

Trump gave few specifics but said that China would continue to export magnets and rare earth materials to the U.S. and only implement a 10% tariff on American goods. The U.S., in turn, would enforce a 55% tariff on exports from the People’s Republic of China to the U.S. and let Chinese students continue to attend American colleges and universities.

The U.S. and China had previously levied tariffs as high as 145% and 125% on each other, respectively. Trump’s administration had also signaled it would start to cancel student visas for Chinese students in a move that a Chinese foreign minister called “discriminatory.”

It remains unclear when the trade deal between the two superpowers goes into effect or whether the U.S. offered China any more concessions. Xinhua, a Chinese state news agency, said the U.S. and China had “candid and in-depth talks” in its evaluation of the agreement.

Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its Consumer Price Index report for May. The U.S. agency noted that inflation had only creeped up by 0.1% from April to 2.4%. That was slightly less than the median estimate of 2.5% from economists polled by FactSet.

Analysts had worried that Trump’s aggressive set of tariffs would increase prices for American consumers. Still, some warn that the full effect of the White House’s trade war hasn’t percolated throughout the economy. “It’s encouraging to see inflation moderate further, and yet we are aware of the possibility of some tariff-related lift in prices coming in the back half of the year,” wrote Rick Rieder, chief investment officer of global fixed income at BlackRock.

Wednesday’s market dip followed a week of gains. In June, the S&P 500 neared the all-time highs it posted in February, which was shortly after the 47th president’s inauguration.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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The story of a stereotypical startup founder has a familiar arc: Drop out of college, launch a startup, raise billions, go public, and then ride off into the sunset as an angel investor in your 40s. That’s not Thijn Lamers. A former executive at the $60 billion fintech giant Adyen, Lamers, who’s in his 50s but declined to specify his exact age, announced on Tuesday he is now president and cofounder of stablecoin startup Noah. “I get so much energy from building,” he said. “I feel like I have the energy of [when I was] 25.”

Lamers’s announcement coincided with news that Noah has raised $22 million in a seed funding round led by LocalGlobe, a veteran venture capital outfit in Europe. Other participants include Felix Capital, FJ Labs, as well as angel investors like Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale and Alexander Matthey, a former CTO at Adyen.

Noah cofounder and CEO Shah Ramezani, a 33-year-old former UBS analyst, declined to disclose the valuation for the startup but did say, in a nod to Lamers’ decades of experience, “there was a Thijn premium.”

The pair join a crowded field. Stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies pegged to real-world assets like the U.S. dollar, have become a buzzy technology among VCs. Investors have piled into a suite of startups who promise to use the digital tokens to speed up cross-border transactions and reduce fees from banking transfers.

Even large fintechs like Stripe and Big Tech stalwarts like Meta are taking notice. And with a gangbuster IPO from stablecoin issuer Circle, others may be looking to replicate its success.

Still, Lamers and Ramezani believe they have an edge. “I would say the most important thing in payments, and that’s why a dropout from MIT [finds it] hard to compete, is the network,” Ramezani said.

His comment underscores how fintech giants build competitive moats through relationships with regulators, customers, and banking partners. And Lamers, who led global sales at Adyen, certainly brings a network with him, including relationships with former executives at Big Tech firms like rideshare giant Uber. “Everything is credibility,” Lamers said.

In fact, the most successful tech founders are, on average, 45 years old, according to a 2018 analysis from Harvard Business Review.

Investor to cofounder

Lamers, who left Adyen in 2018, originally met Ramezani as an investor, not a cofounder. In 2022, Ramezani began exploring how to use cryptocurrencies for payments. He first toyed around with Bitcoin before he decided to raise money for a startup that sells access to an API, or application programming interface, which lets software developers easily transfer funds with stablecoins. 

“We’re really building ‘Noah’s ark’ to save everyone from the mass currency inflation,” Ramezani said, explaining the reasoning behind his startup’s name.

Lamers became so interested in Ramezani’s venture that, instead of just investing, he joined as cofounder in June 2024. Now, the pair have grown Noah’s product offerings to let users convert between 50 currencies and transfer money between 70 countries in real-time—as opposed to waiting perhaps days for bank wires to clear. So far, the company has processed more than $1 billion in transaction volumes, according to Ramezani.

“This guy has so much energy, I’m, like, actually blown away,” said Ramezani, in reference to his cofounder. “Thijn is really like a beast.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Courtesy of Noah/Hadewych Veys

Crypto infrastructure companies were all the rage during the last crypto bear market in 2022 and 2023. Investors threw millions at startups that promised to make the development of crypto applications less clunky and more user-friendly. While some firms have quietly closed up shop, others have now matured—and are raking in new rounds of capital. That includes New York-based Turnkey.

Founded in 2022, Turnkey creates low-level infrastructure for digital wallets where users store and manage their cryptocurrency. On Monday, the startup announced that it had raised $30 million in a Series B funding round led by Bain Capital Crypto. Other investors included Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Faction, Galaxy Ventures,  Wintermute, and Variant.

CEO and cofounder Bryce Ferguson said Turnkey’s appeal lies in its ability to add and streamline advanced features to wallets.

“We’re moving from this world of these slow, clunky systems that were designed for buying and holding crypto to very high throughput, machine-based transactions,” he added.

Like many crypto startup founders, Ferguson and his cofounder, Jack Kearney, are alumni of Coinbase, the U.S.’s largest crypto exchange, and worked at the company’s division dedicated to holding assets for big institutional investors.

After Ferguson left Coinbase in 2021 and started a job as leader of the crypto division of Trade Republic, a broker based out of Berlin, he realized there were “a lot of rough edges” around the infrastructure that companies use to hold their crypto.

So, he teamed up with his former colleague Kearney, who was then working for the vaunted crypto VC Polychain, to launch Turnkey. The company offers APIs, or application programming interfaces, where developers can plug into the startup’s software to easily create and manage crypto wallets for their users. Many well-known firms in the crypto industry use Turnkey’s product, including the prediction market platform Polymarket, the NFT marketplace Magic Eden, and Bridge, the stablecoin startup recently acquired by fintech giant Stripe.

The startup’s competitors include crypto infrastructure companies like Fireblocks as well as Privy, another company that lets companies easily create and manage users’ crypto wallets. Still, Ferguson says business is booming. Over the past year, the number of transactions it’s processed has increased 200 times over. And while his startup is not in the black, it does “have a clear path to profitability,” he said.

Investors in the round received stock as well as token warrants, or promised allocations of a yet-be-released cryptocurrency. Ferguson, however, said his startup has no plans to launch its own cryptocurrency and the warrants are common additions to most crypto deals.

He and his cofounder plan to use the new injection of cash to grow his staff of currently 35 employees, especially his engineering team. 

“Most of the UX [user experience] challenges that people have talked about over the past five years in crypto have been solved,” he said. “Ultimately, the building blocks are there.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Courtesy of Turnkey