How payment gateways lower barriers to crypto payment adoption by merchants: Report

An estimated 741 million people held crypto assets globally in 2025, yet direct cryptocurrency payments accounted for just 0.19% of global e-commerce transaction value. Even Stable coins, one of crypto’s clearest payment use cases, remain far more prominent in business-to-business flows than in everyday consumer purchases.

In consumer-to-business payments, the practical question is whether merchants have enough reason to accept crypto to justify the added operational burden. With direct crypto acceptance, merchants are responsible for managing payment addresses, confirmations, network fees, volatility, reconciliation and conversion into fiat. 

Source: McKinsey

Crypto payment gateways shift much of this responsibility away from the merchant by handling checkout, transaction monitoring, conversion and settlement on their behalf.

This raises the question of whether removing operational friction through payment gateways makes accepting crypto commercially worthwhile for merchants.

A new report by Cointelegraph Research titled “Crypto Payment Gateways: Infrastructure, Adoption, and the Merchant Acceptance Gap” examines this question from checkout through merchant settlement.

Click to read the full research report here.

The report examines where gateway providers can make this process more competitive with cards and bank transfers. The results show that the value of a gateway depends heavily on the payment problem it is being asked to solve.

Crypto gateways have made their strongest progress in digital services and cross-border payments, where traditional payment methods can be expensive, slow or unreliable. Similar incentives are visible in markets such as Nigeria, Vietnam and parts of Latin America, where payment friction gives merchants and customers a stronger reason to use alternative rails.

The report also assesses how BitPay, PassimPay, Coinbase Business, NOWPayments and CoinGate approach the merchant problem, and identifies six unresolved conditions that could determine whether crypto payments move beyond their current areas of adoption.

The next stage of crypto payment adoption may therefore depend less on convincing more consumers to hold digital assets and more on making those assets sufficiently cheap, reliable and easy for merchants to accept.

Read the full Cointelegraph Research report here.