A few days ago, we announced a cross-promotion between Binance and Zombie Battleground that included a $10,000 BNB giveaway.

This promotion required adding some additional functionality to Loom Basechain, where the Zombie Battleground card pack purchase contract lives:

The ability to deposit BNB tokens from Ethereum mainnet to Basechain, and withdraw them back to mainnet; The ability to accept BNB as a currency for payments on Layer 2; and Most importantly, the whole experience had to feel seamless to a user who only has an Ethereum account and has never interacted with Basechain before — i.e. users should be able to check out with only a MetaMask account, and the experience should feel as silky smooth as if they were interacting with any normal Ethereum smart contract.

Basechain support for the top 100 ERC20 tokens

Since BNB is an ERC20 token, adding support for one token on Basechain meant we were easily able to abstract the logic and apply it to any ERC20 token.

So we figured, why not just add 100 of them?

As of now, we’ve officially added support for the top 100 ERC20 tokens by market cap on Basechain.

Possibly most importantly, included in these top 100 ERC20 tokens are six major stablecoins: Coinbase/Circle’s USD Coin (USDC), TrustToken’s TrueUSD (TUSD), Maker Dai (DAI), Paxos Standard Token (PAX), Gemini Dollar (GUSD), and STASIS EURS (EURS).

For those who have been following our recent Binance promotion, you can go ahead and try it in action yourself — the 5 USD stablecoins have now been enabled as payment methods for card packs on our Binance promotion page.

The Significance of Stablecoins

Kyle Torpey recently wrote that Bitcoin is processing fewer payments per month than it was in 2016.

It’s becoming pretty clear as time goes on that most cryptocurrencies are unlikely to be used as “digital cash” for online payments.

The major cryptos, like ETH and BTC, do offer a number of significant benefits over traditional online payment methods like credit cards. However, their prices are volatile by nature, and this volatility is a major factor that has prevented mass adoption as a currency specifically.

For one, many people who hold these tokens think they’re going to go up in value over time — and why would anyone want to spend an asset that they believe at some point in the future will be worth 2x as much as it is today?

That’s how HODLer’s feel about their ETH, bro! 😜

It’s also complicated for developers / merchants to price their items in an asset that can fluctuate 20% in value in a day.

It not only provides a frustrating experience for their users if prices are shifting constantly, but these fluctuations also create difficulties in cash-flow management for a business who has to pay their employees at the end of each month.

Stablecoins: The Best of Both Worlds

Looking at cryptocurrencies from the perspective of “digital cash”, stablecoins seem to be the perfect solution.

ERC20-based stablecoins provide all the same benefits of cryptocurrencies like BTC and ETH — but without the speculative aspect of needing to take into account drastic price fluctuations over time.

Of course, there’s still a place for cryptoassets like ETH and BTC. But in terms of day-to-day online payments, stablecoins seem to be a superior solution in every way, and one that we anticipate will play a larger and larger role in the future of online payments.

Layer 2: Enabling Lightning-Fast Stablecoin Payments with Near-Instant Settlement

Stablecoins by themselves are great.

But integrating them into a interoperable chain like Basechain is like putting stablecoins on steroids — bringing them even closer to a potentially disruptive form of online payments.

As a recap for those who aren’t familiar with Basechain: Basechain is a production-ready, interoperable DPoS blockchain that offers 1–3 second confirmation times and high transaction throughput. It enables zero-fee and near-instant transfers of tokens, while allowing users to easily transfer their tokens to and from Ethereum and other major chains at any time.

On Ethereum, transactions can take from 15 seconds up to a couple minutes to get confirmed — and during periods of high congestion, significantly longer.

This does not provide a great UX for something like in-app purchases in an online game, or an online checkout at an e-commerce store, since the user would have to be left waiting until their transaction finally gets included in a block.

But since Basechain offers much shorter time-to-finality (typically 1–3 seconds), it allows for an online payments experience using crypto that is comparable to using a credit card.

For example, it would now be possible to build a checkout process on Basechain with a very similar UX to something like PayPal, or Amazon’s one-click checkout. But in this case, it would be using crypto stablecoin payments with instant and irreversible settlement — literally like spending “digital cash.”

We’ve built it such that Ethereum users can sign transactions on Basechain using their existing Ethereum wallet (like MetaMask). So the payment flow would simply look like this:

The user’s Ethereum wallet pops up when it comes time to make a payment; They sign the transaction; and A few seconds later, the purchase is complete, allowing them to immediately receive the digital item they purchased.

Of course, Basechain is less decentralized than Ethereum — it trades some of Ethereum’s decentralization for a massive increase in transaction speed and throughput.

But because Basechain is built to be fully interoperable with Ethereum, that makes it a complementary solution — an extension of Ethereum.

An apt analogy may be to think of a user’s Ethereum account as their savings account, and their Basechain wallet as their checking account, or a pre-paid visa card.

A user could transfer $100 of their stablecoin of choice to their Basechain wallet, keeping it topped off with enough funds to make day-to-day payments online, but leave the bulk of their savings on Ethereum for safekeeping.

When their balance runs low, they simply head over to their Basechain wallet, transfer some more funds in from their ETH account, and wait a couple minutes for Ethereum to settle the transaction for the funds to become available.

Ethereum controls the token issuance — Basechain is where users send the tokens they want to use and interact with regularly.

Merchants — the developers building DApps and games, and in the future, potentially even traditional e-commerce websites — can integrate with Basechain to offer their users a seamless checkout experience using their crypto through a decentralized payment gateway, accepting any number of different tokens their users want to pay in.