Why Are Merchants Accepting Crypto & Stablecoins Payments?
Payments companies are increasingly offering a way to pay for goods and services with crypto and stablecoins at checkout.
Payments companies are hearing the same request from more merchants than ever. Large global merchants such as hotels, airlines and multinational corporations are particularly interested in adding crypto and stablecoins as another payment method at checkout. The question has shifted from whether to offer crypto and stablecoin acceptance to how to do it without taking on new complexities.
What Does Paying in Crypto Really Mean?
Pay with Crypto is exactly what it sounds like: a payments company enables crypto and stablecoin acceptance at checkout for its merchants — whether that's ecommerce, Point of Sale (POS) or both. The customer selects crypto or stablecoin at checkout the same way they'd select a credit card or a digital wallet, pays from their wallet and the transaction confirms. Think of it the same way as adding any other APM or LPM to your checkout process. It's just another payment method. The PSP's stablecoin and crypto infrastructure provider handles the automatic conversion of crypto to fiat (USD, EUR, GBP, etc.), which is then settled to the merchant's bank account just like it normally would be for any other payment method. There is no risk of volatility with most solutions since it is instantly converted.
The merchant never holds crypto. The PSP doesn't need to custody digital assets. Nothing about the existing settlement workflow changes.
Pay with Crypto is an additional payment method alongside the existing ones. Cards, bank transfers, local payment methods — none of that changes. This adds a new option that runs on blockchain infrastructure — available to the end customer at checkout without disrupting the rails that already exist and work. It's purely complementary. It gives consumers more options and reaches more customers.
Why Payments Companies Are Offering It
Merchant demand is already here
The segment of merchants asking for crypto and stablecoin acceptance is growing — and expanding in categories that represent some of the highest-value merchant relationships a PSP can have. We're seeing broad appeal for merchant acceptance as crypto and stablecoins become more mainstream. There are now more than 560 million people globally using crypto so it really touches every sector at this point. Large multi-national conglomerates, international hotel chains and airlines. Global businesses tend to benefit the most. This isn't for your local coffee shop (yet). The PSPs who can say yes are winning those relationships, and building stickier relationships with their merchants. For something like new payment methods, it's better to be too early than too late. You don't want to lose a prospect or customer because your competitor offered the latest payment method but you didn't.
Chargebacks are a structural problem — and crypto eliminates them at the infrastructure level
This is where the business case for crypto acceptance gets concrete for many PSPs and acquirers.
Chargebacks are one of the most expensive and persistent problems in payments. Global chargeback costs hit $33.79 billion in 2025 and are projected to keep climbing. The all-in cost per dispute averages $110 once you factor in lost product, fulfillment, labor and fees. 70-75% of those disputes are friendly fraud, meaning real customers disputing legitimate transactions.
Merchants love that they're able to eliminate chargeback and fraud on all crypto payments, especially on bigger ticket items where a chargeback can really sting. Of course, this benefit flows up to the PSPs as well and reduces their net exposure to fraud and chargebacks.
Crypto and stablecoin payments are structurally different. Once a transaction is confirmed, it is final and irreversible. There is nothing to dispute. Friendly fraud is eliminated at the infrastructure level — not managed after the fact with tools and workflows, but removed entirely by the nature of how the rails work. For PSPs serving high-risk verticals or cross-border merchant portfolios, that changes the risk calculation entirely. In cases where a mistake was made, a refund is still possible but must be agreed to by the merchant.
Unlocking Segments That Don't Fit Traditional Rails
Some merchants aren't just asking for crypto acceptance — they need it. Crypto-native businesses, digital asset platforms, merchants operating in markets where card infrastructure is unreliable or unavailable, international sellers dealing with cross-border card declines and currency friction — for these merchants, traditional rails don't fully solve the problem. Crypto acceptance opens up these relationships without the PSP needing new banking infrastructure or frameworks for each segment.
The Merchant Experience Doesn't Change
Most new payment methods tend to be clunky when they're new. And crypto payments were no exception over the last 15 years. For them to really go mainstream, they need to be as easy to use as credit cards or Apple Pay. After 15 years of innovation, crypto payments have finally arrived in a way that is completely seamless.
If the product requires a merchant to understand the complexities behind crypto payments (wallets, keys or blockchain infrastructure), it won't scale. The PSPs that have successfully deployed crypto acceptance built products where the technical complexity is completely abstracted away.
How Cyclops Built the Best-In-Class Solution for These Problems
Before founding Cyclops, the team spent four years building crypto and stablecoin acceptance products from inside Shift4 Payments — working through the integration challenges, reconciliation requirements and compliance considerations that come with deploying crypto acceptance across a global PSP operation with 300,000+ merchants.
What that process exposed was a consistent gap in the market: the infrastructure available to payments companies wasn't designed for them. Most of it was general purpose and made for trading crypto. No platform was building products for the unique needs of a payments company. After four years of learning the ins and outs of what payments companies need, Cyclops was founded to close that gap. Cyclops is the only crypto and stablecoin infrastructure company building exclusively for payments companies.
