741 million holders, 0.19% of online commerce

Both numbers come from the Cointelegraph Research report "Crypto Payment Gateways: Infrastructure, Adoption, and the Merchant Acceptance Gap."

The gap looks strange right up until you check which side the obstacle sits on.

The problem is on the merchant side

Buyers already have wallets and funds, and plenty of them are willing to pay in crypto. The trouble begins when a business has to accept that payment and record it properly.

A merchant who accepts crypto directly has to generate addresses and track on-chain confirmations. The price can move between payment and settlement. Blockchain activity has to be matched against accounting records, each transaction needs the right tax treatment, and someone has to turn the incoming coins into money for salaries and suppliers.

On top of that, most teams haven't dealt with it before. Accounting isn't sure how it should appear in the reports, and legal has questions about regulation, so the decision often gets postponed.

According to the report, 90% of surveyed merchants would try crypto if it were as simple as taking card payments. So what holds them back is mostly the workload.

What we see in practice

Our merchants rarely come to crypto because the technology interests them. They come when their usual payment methods start causing problems.

Cross-border bank transfers take days, and fees and conversion eat a noticeable part of the amount. International card acquiring costs several times more than crypto processing, and a blockchain transfer skips the chain of correspondent banks.

Crypto payments can't be charged back, which matters a lot to a business that has spent years absorbing fraudulent reversals. The downside is that there's no built-in way to resolve disputes, and in high-dispute categories that is still a real limitation.

For us, the most interesting finding is that retail purchases no longer account for most crypto payment volume. B2B settlement is several times larger than consumer spending on goods, so most crypto payments today are businesses paying each other.

Where this leads

The 0.19% figure says little about the technology itself. It shows how difficult crypto still is to fit into normal business operations.

We expect that number to grow as accepting crypto becomes as easy as accepting cards. That is the problem we work on: taking the operational burden off businesses so crypto becomes one more ordinary payment method.