So I’m the friend here who was with him! I’ve used LN for payments a bunch, but have not done a lot of payments in non-Bitcoin assets. I’ve paid in SOL (Solana) at a pub, and am quite involved and knowledgeable in Crypto in general; Ethereum, DeFi, web3, etc.

I had first paid for coffee via this coinbase promo in Paris at EthCC ‘23, but I think they gave you $2 USDC on testnet or something, can’t recall exactly. Regardless, it was a Gasless transaction (didn’t require me to have ETH to cover the fees). As the USDC is on Base network, it’s cheap and fast, so that part is cool. I will say that the wallet UI/UX is still lacking a bit. Particularly for new users. Additionally, I tried to pay from a variety of other wallets: MetaMask, Rainbow, Nest, etc, and none of them were able to read the QR presented. So I’d say this is kind of a failure if we are forced to use a specific, proprietary wallet.

The EVM world is so far behind on basic payments rails, it’s really sad to see this. I get that we finally got cheap L2’s now thanks to Blobs, so it wasn’t feasible in the past. So hopefully this makes it to some Coinbase people, and they can take some feedback from this post, as Leo is an LN payment specialist.

Regardless, let’s keep building more, better payment systems to adopt crypto. <3