Today in Crypto: Coinbase Streamlines Crypto Checkout in Merchant Tool; Despite Ban, China has 21% of Global Bitcoin Mining

Coinbase will integrate with Primer, which will make a more seamless crypto checkout experience, leveraging Coinbase Commerce, a company blog said Tuesday (May 17).

This is in response to the often cumbersome options for payment, as merchants make it so consumers have as much flexibility as possible.

Primer is an automation platform for payments, offering a “completely unified” checkout and payment infrastructure, letting merchants connect and control payments stacks, and letting anyone build sophisticated payments flows with a no-code editor.

Meanwhile, Coinbase will be slowing down its hiring, in order to “reprioritize [its] hiring needs” against its business goals.

The company said its original plan was to triple the company’s size, though the current marketing necessitates otherwise. The company said the slowdown will make it more rigorous in its priorities and will help current employees be more successful.

In other news, China has become the second-largest locale for bitcoin mining, next to the U.S., in spite of the Chinese government’s ban on this activity from 2021, a report from Bloomberg said.

The U.S. saw 37.84% of global hashrate, the measure of computing power used to extract the currency, between September 2021 and January, per the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.

China has seen more activity in “covert mining operations” and is now a “major mining hub” again, in spite of the ban.

In other news, Paul-Willem van Gerwen, head of the capital market infrastructure and transparency at the Dutch Authority for Financial Markets, said at the Amsterdam Proprietary Trading Managers’ Meeting that crypto’s popularity “has our attention.”

He said there are likely risks to take into account, such as a lack of transparency, manipulation and other criminal acts. But there would be opportunities, too, like developing a consolidated tape for the European markets.

He recommended, however, that crypto derivatives be sold wholesale only, and not in the retail market. He also said crypto tools “aren’t yet suitable as a means of payment
and/or investment.”

Meanwhile, Bitcoin was lingering at around $30,000 on Tuesday, in a tentative trading round after a collapse in much of the market, Bloomberg wrote.

Bitcoin, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency, rose by 2.7% on Tuesday and traded at $30,139.