When we talk about payment vision and PayFi narrative, we don’t know that crypto payments with stablecoins as the core have quietly advanced to the stage of application landing.

The Coingate 2024 Crypto Payment Report also pointed out that CoinGate processed 1,677,288 crypto payments that year, of which 35.5% were completed in the form of stablecoins.

At the same time, traditional payment giants such as Stripe, Paypal, Visa, and Mastercard have also settled in.

However, although current crypto payments can realize payment functions in real life, Mass Adoption still remains in the "last mile".

According to eMarketer's forecast, from 2024 to 2026, the number of crypto payment users in the United States will grow rapidly by 82%, but the proportion of payments will only increase by about 20%, reaching 39.1% of US users. In addition, the report also predicts that only 2.6% of users worldwide will use crypto payments in 2026.

CoinGate's data also confirms this point - 21% of US orders are paid with cryptocurrency, 6-6.5% in Germany, 5.2-5.7% in the UK, and no more than 1% in emerging markets such as Nigeria and Ukraine.

Why is this the case?

Ecological Map: The Current State of the Puzzle of the Crypto Payment Industry Chain

Imagine that when you buy a drink at a convenience store on a foreign street, you only need to open your mobile wallet and scan the code to complete the payment with cryptocurrency - no bank card is required, no cumbersome binding is required, and the settlement is completed instantly.

This is the daily scenario that should exist when crypto payment truly realizes Mass Adoption, and it is also the goal that the entire industry is striving to pursue.

To achieve such a seamless and convenient crypto payment experience, a whole set of complex and coordinated infrastructure support is actually needed behind it. From asset issuance, payment transfer, user entrance to merchant terminal, every link is indispensable.

Asset issuance

In the payment field, although any encrypted asset can be used for transfer in theory, in actual applications, due to price volatility, payment and settlement stability and other considerations, BTC and stablecoins have become the most commonly used payment media, among which stablecoins have shown a clear dominant position in terms of the number of transactions and the proportion of the amount.

Currently, Circle (USDC), Tether (USDT) and PayPal (PYUSD) are the main stablecoin issuers. Among them, USDC and USDT have been widely circulated on multiple blockchain networks and have become mainstream payment methods. Especially USDT, according to CoinGate's report, its transaction volume accounted for 97.2%, and USDC ranked second.

Currently, stablecoin issuers are actively expanding cooperation channels with payment gateways, cross-border settlement platforms and traditional financial institutions.

For example, Circle has been cooperating with Visa since 2023 to integrate USDC into Visa's cross-border settlement network, covering about 190 countries, thereby effectively reducing the friction costs in traditional foreign exchange transactions; PayPal also launched PYUSD in 2024, and gradually integrated it into Venmo and X (formerly Twitter) platforms to expand the application of stablecoins in social payment scenarios.

Payment transfer

The payment transfer link undertakes the key task of connecting the flow of assets on the chain with the consumption system under the chain.

Native encrypted payment transfer, such as Binance Pay, Coinbase Commerce, and AlchemyPay, focuses on bridging the assets on the chain with the real legal currency system, and undertakes key functions such as asset exchange, transaction matching, and payment settlement.

At the same time, traditional payment giants are also accelerating their expansion into the field of encrypted payment.

In February 2025, Stripe acquired the stablecoin infrastructure platform Bridge for $1.1 billion, marking its official layout in the field of on-chain settlement; Visa chose to cooperate with Circle to support USDC clearing in its cross-border settlement network, and gradually expanded to high-performance public chains such as Solana.

User Portal

In the early days of crypto payment, users mainly used crypto debit cards, U cards, etc. as payment portals to convert on-chain assets into legal currency account balances, and then connected to traditional VISA or Mastercard clearing systems to realize consumer payments. Although this model has broadened the use scenarios of assets, it still relies on traditional financial infrastructure and fails to truly realize the native circulation of on-chain assets.

With the continuous evolution of the functions of wallet applications, on-chain wallets have gradually become a new user entrance for encrypted payments. Mainstream wallets such as MetaMask, Trust Wallet, and Bitget Wallet not only undertake the functions of user asset management and transaction signatures, but also enable users to directly initiate payment requests by scanning codes and other methods through the integration of on-chain payment APIs or third-party payment gateway interfaces, and use on-chain assets such as stablecoins to complete consumption, bypassing the traditional legal currency account system.

Merchant terminals

Merchant terminals cover industries such as retail, e-commerce, tourism, and hotels. They are the ultimate application scenario for encrypted payments to achieve Mass Adoption in the real world, and are also the core driving force for the completion of the closed loop of the industrial chain.

Traditionally, merchants are cautious about directly accepting crypto assets due to factors such as technical barriers, volatility risks and compliance uncertainties. In recent years, with the popularization of stablecoins, the maturity of payment gateway technology and the shortening of settlement cycles, merchants' enthusiasm for accessing crypto payments has gradually increased. According to the NFT Evening report, the number of merchants accepting crypto payments worldwide will reach 12,834 in 2024, an increase of 50% from 2023. Among them, Europe leads with 5,677 merchants, and Brazil ranks first in the country list with 1,292.

At the same time, some regional markets, such as emerging economies with high mobile payment penetration rates such as Southeast Asia and Latin America, have become the first areas for crypto payment applications. PayPal, AlchemyPay, Binance Pay and other platforms have promoted the implementation of crypto payments in actual consumption scenarios by cooperating with local merchant networks, gradually breaking the path dependence of the traditional payment system.

The crux of the last mile: Why is it stuck at the consumer end?

With the continuous improvement of the stablecoin settlement system and the continuous evolution of wallet functions, why has crypto payment still not penetrated into daily consumption scenarios?

From the perspective of technology and products, current users can use cryptocurrencies for quick settlement, but at the actual consumer end, the lagging user experience constitutes an insurmountable "last mile".

High integration cost

Currently, one of the biggest obstacles to crypto payments on the merchant side comes from the "separation of wallets and merchant systems". Due to the lack of a unified standardized structure, merchants often need to repeatedly develop for different wallets and different chain environments when accessing crypto payments, which significantly increases the difficulty and cost of integration.

According to a survey by Deloitte, 89% of the companies surveyed said that the complexity of integrating digital currencies with existing financial infrastructure is one of the main challenges. In this regard, Pakning Luk, head of strategy at blockchain payment gateway Paydify, proposed at the Money20/20 Summit that by connecting all wallets and blockchains, supporting instant settlement of stablecoins, and zero handling fees, global merchants and users can easily receive and pay cryptocurrencies.

Long settlement cycle

Although on-chain payment theoretically supports second-level settlement, in the actual business environment, the settlement process still relies heavily on traditional payment infrastructure.

Take Stripe as an example. While it provides on-chain payment functions, merchants usually have to wait 2 to 3 working days for funds to arrive. This delay poses a major obstacle to cash flow management for retail and cross-border trade companies with high liquidity requirements.

Ecological Islands

The resistance on the user side comes from the increasingly serious fragmentation trend of the encrypted payment ecosystem in a multi-chain environment.

When users make on-chain payments, they often need to manually switch chain networks or wallet plug-ins, which increases the complexity of operations and affects the smoothness of payments. At the same time, some large payment platforms, due to the platform lock-up strategy, deeply bind merchants to their own ecosystems, limiting their flexibility to switch to other payment networks and exacerbating the "ecological island" phenomenon.

Take Binance Pay as an example. Its payment path is mainly limited to the Binance ecosystem. It has limited support for non-Binance wallet users and is difficult to achieve interoperability with other mainstream wallets (such as MetaMask, Bitget Wallet, etc.) or non-BSC public chains, further raising the liquidity barrier for on-chain payments.

High volatility

Even if merchants successfully access encrypted payments, the instability of asset value caused by price fluctuations is still one of the key factors restricting its large-scale application.

Compared to the stable and predictable settlement amount in the fiat currency payment system, merchants are at greater risk of exchange rate losses during on-chain payments, especially when using highly volatile assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Even the crypto payment model based on stablecoins is not completely risk-free. For example, under extreme market conditions, some anchored stablecoins (such as USDT and USDC) have also experienced short-term depegging, causing concerns among merchants.

In addition, most current crypto payment solutions fail to achieve payment-time lock-in (i.e., the settlement exchange rate is locked at the moment of payment initiation), which results in price slippage caused by the on-chain confirmation time during the payment process, further amplifying the risk exposure of merchants.

From complex integration to price fluctuations, the real challenge of crypto payment is not the technology itself, but the channel structure between the chain and people that has not yet been truly connected.

Prospects for Crypto Payment

When we look back at the development of crypto payment over the past few years, we will find that what it has always lacked is not technology, but a real "usability transition" - from on-chain accounts to merchant terminals, from wallet operations to daily habits.

At present, the premise of this leap has matured:

• Stablecoin supervision is gradually being implemented, and issuers such as Circle and Tether are actively promoting industry compliance standards in Europe, the United States and Asia;

• Global payment interface standardization is being promoted. For example, many countries in Southeast Asia are promoting national QR payment interoperability standards;

• Cross-chain interoperability protocols (such as Cosmos IBC and LayerZero) are also breaking the ecological fragmentation and building a universal asset circulation network.

The puzzle of infrastructure is being completed, and the Mass Adoption of encrypted payment is also just around the corner.

At this point, what really determines whether encrypted payment can cross this "last mile" is not the superiority of the protocol or the number of functions, but whether it can provide merchants and users with a "no need to understand blockchain" experience.

When off-chain merchants do not need to integrate multiple wallet SDKs, users do not need to switch chain networks or bear slippage costs, when encrypted assets are no longer just investment targets, but become "daily currencies" in restaurant code scanning, App subscriptions, and cross-border settlements, encrypted payment can be truly implemented.

This requires not only technical openness, but also a deep understanding and continuous optimization of "scenario adaptation", "merchant trust" and "user fluency".

Only by opening up this "last mile" can we truly usher in the era of large-scale encrypted payment.

Mass Adoption is not only on the chain, but also in the scan code payment on the streets.

Related information

1. Data comprehensively analyzes the capital flows behind the trillion-dollar growth of stablecoins. If the altcoins did not rise, where did the money go?

2. Coinbase + Glassnode: Charting Crypto Q2 2025

3. CoinGate Crypto Payments Report 2024: The Year of Stablecoins

4. Cryptocurrency payment usage will jump from a low base in the next few years, as more owners convert to payers

5. Study: 88% of Businesses Reported Higher Revenue after Accepting Crypto Payment

6. Digital currency payments and merchant adoption survey

7. Payment settlement explained: How it works and how long it takes

8. Blockchain payment gateway Paydify discusses the future of blockchain payments at Money20/20: standardization, compatibility and merchant integration are key issues