The payment gateway for retailers, Coinbase Commerce, has announced that it would no longer support native Bitcoin and other UTXO currency. The company’s head of product, Lauren Dowling, made the announcement of this move and gave an explanation of why it was a difficult decision, citing difficulties in making improvements to its EVM payment system for Bitcoin.
The most recent version of the Commerce functionality can handle a variety of asset types, including native tokens and ERC-20s, and guarantees that payment details are documented on the blockchain. For merchants, it automatically converts payments to USDC at a predetermined rate.
Native support for Bitcoin and other UTXOs has been eliminated due to the difficulty of obtaining the same functionality on the Bitcoin blockchain without the use of smart contracts and stablecoins.
“Zooming out—we think that using cryptocurrencycurrency to pay for goods online won’t really go mainstream until we get off layer 1, reduce transaction fees, and speed up confirmation times, so we’re trying to accelerate the move toward that world,” said Brian Armstrong.
Transparency and security are given priority in the UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output) architecture that Bitcoin uses to monitor transactions. Unlike Ethereum, this account format is more flexible and resembles typical bank accounts. Dogecoin and other cryptocurrencycurrencies deriving from Bitcoin also use the UTXO concept.
The decision to remove native support for Bitcoin has sparked controversy online, with some users drawing attention to how this could affect Bitcoin’s ability to gain broader traction.
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