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Coinbase Plugs Apple Pay Into Its Fiat 'Onramp' for Third-Party Crypto Apps
The integration means self-custody wallets and the like can now let users pay for crypto purchases with the popular app included by default on every iPhone.
Updated Dec 19, 2024, 8:27 p.m. Published Dec 2, 2024, 5:00 p.m.
What to know:
- Coinbase has added Apple Pay support to its Onramp platform, meaning users of third-party apps can fund their crypto purchases with the iPhone maker's payment service.
- The Apple Pay integration is supposed to make buying crypto quicker, as the service is widely used among consumers.
Coinbase has added Apple Pay support to its Onramp platform, meaning users of third-party apps, such as self-custody wallets, can fund their crypto purchases with the iPhone maker's payment service.
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Buying crypto with fiat currency, especially the first time, can be a lengthy process, going back and forth with exchanges and enduring long KYC (know-your-customer) checks. The Apple Pay integration is supposed to make that process quicker, because the service is widely used among consumers, included by default on the tech giant's devices.
Introduced in 2014, Apple Pay has now roughly 500 million active users, and in the U.S. it holds over 90% of the market share for contactless payments.
“What on-ramp products do, in general, is they allow you to bring fiat into crypto. And historically, this has been a painful process,” said Nemil Dalal, the head of Coinbase’s developer platform, in an interview with CoinDesk. “With Onramp, the idea is that in a matter of seconds, with a familiar wallet experience that 60 million Americans are already used to using Apple Pay, you can hook up your bank account, move money on-chain, and then go do whatever you want."
According to Dalal, you can already buy crypto on Uniswap via Coinbase Onramp. A draft blog post from Coinbase mentions Moonshot, an app for buying memecoins like dogwifhat and Iggy Azalea's MOTHER, that now takes cash deposits through Apple Pay.
The Onramp team uses certain data associated with the user's payment card that it receives via its Apple Pay integration to run Coinbase's own KYC procedures, sparing the consumer from having to manually provide that information to Coinbase.
As part of the integration, users who buy the USDC stablecoin with Apple Pay through Coinbase Onramp will not have to pay any transaction fees.
Read more: Ledger, Coinbase Pay Integrate to Give Users Direct Access to Buy, Sell Crypto
UPDATE (December 19, 2024, 20:27 UTC): Clarifies statement about KYC in second-to-last paragraph.
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