Pollak: Coinbase and Shopify condensed payment systems into 1,000-line smart contract
Jesse Pollak · Why Now Is The Best Time To Build In Crypto · Y Combinator · Sep 23, 2025 · at 21:43
Jesse Pollak (creator of Base at Coinbase) explains how Coinbase embedded with Shopify's engineering team to build an onchain commerce protocol.
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“And what we did over a nine month period was exactly that. We went into their systems, which are literally millions of lines of code where they're doing things like escrow they're taking taxes they're doing, you know, fees, tariffs they're doing refunds, chargebacks, like all of this business logic around accepting money for a good, which, you know, for most of us, I think is kind of behind the scenes, but for a business like Shopify, like it is the scene. It's the thing that you're doing. And they said, okay, how do we now translate that into a smart contract? And the crazy thing is that after nine months of work, we translated into smart contract. And that smart contract ended up being about a thousand lines of code.”
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