Helio upgrades its Solana Pay plugin for Shopify

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.

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:

The Breakdown: Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily.
Empire: Crypto news and analysis to start your day.
Forward Guidance: The intersection of crypto, macro and policy.
0xResearch: Alpha directly in your inbox.
Lightspeed: All things Solana.
The Drop: Apps, games, memes and more.
Supply Shock: Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin.