Cryptocurrency-friendly e-commerce giant Shopify has thrown out a suite of blockchain commerce tools to improve the user experience of your Web3-centric stores hosted on the platform.
Announcing the move via Twitter on Feb. 9, Shopify’s blockchain team designer @ryancreatescopy noted, “We’ve released some new tools to help you build tokengating apps for Shopify merchants.”
In particular, the expanded crypto wallet connection features and tokengating application programming interface (API) tools have been highlighted. The latter has been in early access beta access mode since June 2022 and was previously only available to a select number of merchants.
With tokengating, all applicable Shopify merchants can now configure their stores to dictate which token holders can and cannot gain access to exclusive products, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and benefits.
The tool verifies the user’s eligibility through their connected wallet and is promoted as a handy way for NFT traders to reward certain users or add exclusivity to specific products.
In terms of expanded crypto wallet support, Shopify has integrated with the Session Initiation Protocol with Ethereum (SIWE) led by the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) and the Ethereum Foundation.
SIWE essentially enables secure user logins and authentication of Ethereum accounts and ENS domains without revealing private identifiers to third parties, such as names, phone numbers, and residential addresses.
The issue of private user information has been a sour point for Shopify in the past. In April 2022, a group of disgruntled users filed a class action lawsuit against the company and hardware wallet provider Ledger in connection with a large user data breach in 2020.
Related: Ethereum’s Shapella transition is ‘on the horizon’
ENS Labs community advocate @sadaf.eth highlighted SIWE’s integration with Shopify via Twitter on February 9 and linked to developer docs explaining how to build the tool in Shopify stores, much to the delight of some members of the Ethereum community.
lfggg pic.twitter.com/sjfptLkPwL
— broke.eth (@Melvininho) February 10, 2023
“The statementGenerator plugin allows you to customize the statement displayed in an Ethereum login message. The feature receives the address of the wallet that has connected, allowing you to expand and customize your message statements to better fit your brand,” the document reads.
At this stage, once a merchant plugs in the SIWE feature in Shopify wallet connect, it appears that users will be able to click the “sign in with Ethereum” button to connect their addresses through SIWE partner brokers such as Coinbase, Fortmatic, WalletConnect. , Portis and Bull.
