TL;DR: Introducing a new standard for one-step crypto payments. Try it on Shopify today using Base Pay here, and start building with it here.

Payments are one of the most exciting areas in crypto today, but the actual experience of paying with crypto leaves a lot to be desired. Generally, it is a two to three step process, requiring a user to switch context between their wallet and the app where they are paying multiple times:

Connect wallet

Switch network (if needed)

Sign 

Crypto payments are constrained by wallet APIs and UX patterns that were built for a different era: one in which users were connecting a wallet to an app for a long lived session. For onchain payments to succeed at scale, we must provide something far simpler. 

Today, we're excited to introduce a new standard for one-step crypto payments. It's built on open standards that are available to anyone, ready to be adopted industry-wide. Try it on Shopify today using Base Pay here, and start building with it here.

There are three innovations powering this experience:

Prolinks

Stateless Interactions

Callbacks

Let's dive into each.

1. Prolinks

Prolinks are a new standard (ERC-8050) for representing JSON-RPC requests in a highly compressed URI.

There have been several previous attempts to standardize a URI format for wallet requests. However, past ERCs have been too opinionated, e.g. assuming that the URI represents a transaction. 

Prolinks are generic: allowing communication about any existing or future wallet APIs. They are also size efficient, leveraging protocol buffers and Brotli compression. 

TL;DR: Introducing a new standard for one-step crypto payments. Try it on Shopify today using Base Pay here, and start building with it here.

Payments are one of the most exciting areas in crypto today, but the actual experience of paying with crypto leaves a lot to be desired. Generally, it is a two to three step process, requiring a user to switch context between their wallet and the app where they are paying multiple times:

Connect wallet

Switch network (if needed)

Sign 

Crypto payments are constrained by wallet APIs and UX patterns that were built for a different era: one in which users were connecting a wallet to an app for a long lived session. For onchain payments to succeed at scale, we must provide something far simpler. 

Today, we're excited to introduce a new standard for one-step crypto payments. It's built on open standards that are available to anyone, ready to be adopted industry-wide. Try it on Shopify today using Base Pay here, and start building with it here.

There are three innovations powering this experience:

Prolinks

Stateless Interactions

Callbacks

Let's dive into each.

1. Prolinks

Prolinks are a new standard (ERC-8050) for representing JSON-RPC requests in a highly compressed URI.

There have been several previous attempts to standardize a URI format for wallet requests. However, past ERCs have been too opinionated, e.g. assuming that the URI represents a transaction. 

Prolinks are generic: allowing communication about any existing or future wallet APIs. They are also size efficient, leveraging protocol buffers and Brotli compression.