This week we're announcing Burner Terminal, a point of sale device designed for native tap to pay stablecoin payments. While there are a number of projects that have allowed for cryptocurrency and stablecoin payments via QR code over the years, we believe that in most developed markets the user experience of contactless cards has won for retail payments.
We saw some early interest in using Burner for tap payments, however, we quickly learned that most payments terminals fully lock down their NFC components to only EMV compliant cards (e.g. Visa, Mastercard). We built Terminal to enable a novel open NFC interface focused on stablecoin payments. Terminal looks like a cross between a translucent Gameboy from the 90s and a square Android.
Terminal is initially designed for small merchants who would typically opt for a small Square or Clover reader; think food trucks, farmers markets, bodegas and small mom and pops who want to explore ways to offer digital payments without high fees. It still lets a merchant accept traditional credit cards while opening up a new avenue for direct stablecoin acceptance as well. We will offer optional offramping for merchants, however, we anticipate that stablecoin only payments will be fully free to process. As a fallback for those without a Burner wallet, we're also enabling QR code support via EIP-681.
We've announced USDC support on Base, but we anticipate supporting a variety of stablecoins and networks. This is much easier to do via a contactless interface than QR code as we can bidirectionally negotiate which stablecoin to use depending on which one a user might have.
We have a lot more to share once we launch Terminal early next year, but the goal is to retail for under $200 starting with the U.S. market.
