Crypto taking on the mainstream has reached a new milestone as the CEO of the e-commerce giant Shopify, Tobi Lutke, has published on Twitter his pondering about how to integrate his company with the DeFi ecosystem.
He asked the Twitter community what “role” Shopify could play in the growing financial vertical.
Hundreds of responses came, including several from important DeFi power players. For example, Nansen’s Alex Svanevik brought up stablecoin payments and using DeFi protocols to let cash in Shopify accounts to earn yield. ConsenSys’ Corbin Page also pointed to a hackathon project that deposited payments directly into yield-bearing protocols.
Other suggestions focused on leveraging deposited funds for payments, real-time subscription fees, and also relying on protocols such as Alchemix to permit asset-backed loans for payments.
While indeed speculative, these thoughts of Lutke indicate that he may have caught the crypto bug as well. He has also posted on Twitter that he’d been “dabbing” with smart contracts, and called their functionality “fascinating.” He now also seems to have an interest in the DeFi.
Lutke has also tweeted that while it clearly won’t fit a purist’s definition of decentralization, Shopify does have the goal of reducing barriers and friction when it comes to online retail, which he sees as being a “spiritual cousin to DeFi.”