Coinbase announced the launch of the on April 3, which makes it easier for merchants to accept cryptocurrencies as part of their existing e-commerce solution.
The API (Application Programming Interface) enables the merchant to automatically generate the option of paying with cryptocurrency and use the infrastructure provided by Coinbase; a seamless adoption which doesn’t require them to develop their own payment platform.
The API also enables integration with WordPress, and with Shopify, allowing smaller e-commerce enterprises to expand accepted payments into cryptocurrency.
The solution will enable Coinbase Commerce to more effectively compete with other payment enabling platforms, like Stripe, who recently announced that they were ending support for bitcoin payments to online merchants.
What is Coinbase Commerce?
Despite a host of complaints, culminating in a boycott from r/bitcoin, Coinbase remains the largest fiat gateway in the west.
Coinbase commerce, launched in February, is their own PayPal-like service; a new platform enabling merchants to accept payments with , , , and . Using the platform on an e-commerce website adds a PayPal-like button to the checkout screen, and directs funds into a user-controlled wallet. In this way, merchants maintain full control over their funds.
The service can also be used in physical stores and differs from previous point-of-sale (POS) offerings by allowing more control over the balances merchants hold. Letting them store their keys and tokens locally.
However, as one astute Reddit observer noted, the system still presents a diversion from Satoshi’s :
“A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Any intermediary between your BTC payment and the merchant is violating the definition of bitcoin and your privacy.” – Reddit user bitcoin-Yoda
Coinbase are not alone with their offering; BitPay, one of the largest bitcoin payment processors, lets customers pay in and . But Coinbase commerce looks to be the first to offer easy integration of a range of cryptocurrencies.
Still, it is not certain whether or not the initiative will encourage merchants to take the extra payment method onboard. The volatility of bitcoin has led some merchants to rescind their acceptance of the cryptocurrency. This was cited by as one of the key reasons they stopped accepting bitcoin as payment in December 2017.
How to Get Started?
Merchants can read the , and sign up for an account at . You can then create an API key in the Settings page.
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An odd occurrence within the community this past April Fool’s day, though it was definitely not a prank. Empty blocks began getting mined by an unknown party, which should only be possible if someone is controlling the chain. The reasoning behind this is unclear, besides just to stir unrest in an already uneasy community watching their crypto plummet day-by-day.
The interesting part of this story, however, is that this should only be possible via a plus ownership of their blockchain. Most blockchains see this sort of attack as a death knell for their coin, as the consequences of a bad player owning more than 50 percent of a chain means that the trustworthiness of their crypto is now at zero.
Once a miner owns the majority of the chain, they are then able to double spend the coin as they are now able to privately mine their own blocks on the chain. It’s as simple as sending a transaction to a merchant and at the same time set up their own private chain, which operates faster than the rest of the network as they are over 51 percent of the processing power available and now both transactions are valid according to the chain.
This has not yet occurred on the Electroneum chain, however the potential is there and no one is quite sure what is going on with these empty blocks. The current suspect for this attack is Bitmain, who now owns a large chunk of the Electroneum chain, as a result of the they announced recently. Electroneum is a fork of , inheriting the CryptoNight hashing algorithm.
Electroneum is probably under a 51% attack right now. Someone may be trying to double spend. Avoid making t..
— Electroneum (@electroneuminfo)
Under Attack During Wider Market Decline
Electroneum is set up as sort of the novice’s first foray into cryptocurrency. is done through a mobile app and educational games about mining cryptocurrencies, with a plan to break into larger gaming and gambling markets in the future. The for this project sold quite well, but recent developments have disappointed investors.
The news of this potential attack is occurring during what was already a , dropping from a peak of $0.20 in January 2018 down to $0.019. Potentially, with this news factored in, a price below $0.010 is entirely possible which drops them below their original price.
Furthermore, a long on funds and deposits that were held in ETN wallets on Cryptopia, one of the two big exchanges for ETN, sent holders into a panic on whether or not their funds were scammed by the company. However, as of later in the afternoon of April 2, this has been solved.
Electroneum has two directions in which it can go at the moment. If the blockchain issue is solved and it turns out this was not a majority attack on the chain, then the potential for an increase back to higher levels is still possible. However, if the developers cannot come to a solution for the problem, then the coin is doomed. Electroneum’s CEO vowed to fight the ASICs in a .
At the moment, though, investing in Electroneum is quite the risky gamble – even compared to the overall cryptocurrency market.
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