Crypto Payments Are Ready for the Mainstream

Cross-border payments have long been defined by delays, fees, and a maze of intermediary banks. Stablecoins are changing that—offering a faster, simpler alternative that cuts out the middleman entirely.

This use case is one of the key drivers behind the stablecoin market’s rapid growth in recent years. However, stablecoins—and digital assets more broadly—have the potential to reshape virtually every payment scenario, from enterprise transactions to retail purchases.

In many cases, the infrastructure to support these applications is already in place, largely due to the rapid proliferation of crypto payment gateways. While early iterations did little more than add a ‘Pay with Crypto’ button at checkout, these crypto gateways have quickly evolved into full-scale payments orchestration platforms.

In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Kate Lifshits, CEO of NOWPayments, and James Wester, Director of Cryptocurrency and Co-Head of Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed the dynamic powers of stablecoins, the remaining regulatory and infrastructure challenges, and how the final barriers to mainstream adoption are steadily falling.

Solving Pain Points

Although they aren’t issued by the U.S. Federal Reserve, leading stablecoins have effectively become a digital representation of the dollar. This makes them a powerful alternative to the existing rails.

“There are some pain points that most merchants that use traditional rails face,” Lifshits said. “Those are speed, availability, costs, and the inability of the traditional rails to meet the rising demand for optimization and innovation. That's exactly where stablecoins come in because if we’re talking about speed, we are talking about several seconds instead of several days. If we’re talking about costs, we're talking about several cents or a dollar instead of a lot of dollars.”

Beyond efficiency gains, the modern infrastructure supporting stablecoins can serve as a springboard for innovation. From a liquidity perspective, near-real-time settlement enhances the time value of money, enabling organizations and consumers to deploy funds more effectively.

Together, these advantages make stablecoins a compelling option across a wide range of use cases.

“In the way that business-to-business payments are being looked at, it is just having another option,” Wester said. “For the longest time there were no options in how you paid your bills, or the options you had were limited, expensive, and slow. It’s just having a new rail that has cheaper, faster, and better settlement time and removes some of the intermediaries who are taking a toll to move things along. And there are also friction points in having all of those intermediaries.”

“We're creating a whole new option that didn't exist before, especially from a B2B standpoint,” he said. “Even remittances—when you're talking about consumers paying each other across borders—what you're seeing now is a new option that is cheaper, faster, better, and begins to drive down costs everywhere.”

The Added Bonus of Crypto

For all the progress in crypto payments, onboarding remains a sticking point. Many merchants are still wary of the perceived complexity of integration, while others lack a clear starting point.

“It's up to the crypto payment gateways to give them the easiest onboarding flow ever,” Lifshits said. “That would mean that when they start using the payment gateway, they see all the traditional tools they are used to, but with the added bonus of crypto.”

The goal is to make crypto payment gateways as intuitive and seamless as the tools merchants already use, such as those offered by Stripe or PayPal.

Gateways must also address longstanding concerns around crypto acceptance, namely, how digital assets are managed after receipt and the volatility of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and Ethereum.

This makes it critical for merchants to have the ability to convert crypto to fiat at any point, as well as the flexibility to choose ho