Figures vary as to the availability of crypto acceptance globally by merchants. In the sartorial style stakes, some bold moves have been made to advance the appeal and extol the virtues of digital currency.
Merchants deploying crypto acceptance
According to statista, 5,968 businesses in the US accepted crypto as an in-store method of payment, as of 2024 sources, and was the top of the list. The second highest number was 1,366 in Italy, followed by 1,133 in Slovenia.
Bitdegree, as quoted by crypto.com, states there are 15,000 globally, 2,000 of which are in the US.
Merchants and Crypto Sentiment
Deloitte published a survey in 2022 with PayPal entitled ‘Merchants getting ready for crypto’, polling 2,000 senior executives at retail organisations across the US covering consumer goods and services equally.
The outlook was resoundingly positive: 85% of respondents strongly agreed to anticipating digital currency payments would be ubiquitous in their industry in five years (2026).
The same number strongly agreed to an expectation their suppliers should accept stablecoins and the same number again strongly agreed to an expectation their suppliers should accept cryptocurrencies.
At about the same time, however, an Oliver Wyman study indicated that less than 1% of Americans planned to use cryptocurrency to pay for items in the future.
More recently, players such as Stripe and PayPal have made ground-shifting moves into digital currency acceptance, Visa and Mastercard are likewise looking at it, albeit much of this is around stablecoins and not crypto, per se.
Aside from stats and figures on usage and adoption, there is plenty of commentary about why crypto is not mainstream, from not being government-backed, to volatility (mainly attributed to bitcoin), to lack of ease of integration with traditional networks.
The thorny and ironic issue of trust is also raised – the inherent decentralised element being for some the quintessential trust factor for its ‘transparency’; for others a suspicious turn-off.
And yet, for many merchants, the benefits are several-fold, not least the absence of dreaded chargebacks.
A cryptocurrency transaction is irreversible, hence some of the more forward-thinking crypto platforms absorbing the cost of would-be chargebacks for merchants.
Indeed, such platforms are really where it’s at, in terms of driving usage and acceptance of crypto, for they are the integrators, the middlemen between systems, networks and schemes, which can knit infrastructure together.
Are Crypto Wallets the Future?
Furthermore, could crypto and associated wallets propel user experience to new heights?
Founder and CEO of MoonPay, Ivan Soto-Wright, speaking on podcast, Blockchain Won’t Save the World, is a major proponent of the benefits for merchants of accepting crypto payments.
And yes, he would be wouldn’t he, but he presents some compelling points.
MoonPay is a so-called ‘ramp suite’, building ‘ramps’ that integrate with merchant and other platforms enabling conversion between fiat and cryptocurrencies.
Essentially, building payments infrastructure for crypto.
Firstly, merchants who integrate such a provider partner don’t have to deal with chargebacks.
“Because the reality with crypto is, when we deliver that crypto, that’s a final transaction, yet you have a card transaction and the legacy infrastructure that is reversible. So how do you deal with those disputes?” says Soto-Wright.
For the time being, these infrastructure-bridging-conversion providers are going to be swallowing the cost of chargebacks.
This is not to be underestimated for a merchant.
We covered chargebacks and growing refund abuse in our last issue, which has become a huge strain on merchants’ time and resource, not to mention pockets, and harder to check against.
For with the rise of first-party misuse, whereby consumers try to game the system – sometimes equipped with how-to fraud manuals being sold increasingly online and on social media – even non-fraud chargebacks are taking up all-too-precious time to review and analyse.
Now, we don’t mean to suggest that the likes of MoonPay would guard against all these types of activity, but it would seem to go a long way in easing its burden.
UX – A Case Study
On a slightly more tangential if not unrelated topic, cryptocurrency itself is a bridge between web 2.0 and web 3.0 and in this world, user experience becomes completely transformed.
In the payments world the humble wallet is where this elevation takes place.
Were crypto to become more widely accepted, so too could NFTs be a gateway to the 365-customer view.
NFTs, crypto in a wallet present an epitome of personalisation. A marketing dream.
You own an NFT in your wallet, “that wallet is rich with all sorts of different information, and you can start to segment the experience to different segments of customers, based on what’s inside those wallets.
We’re at the very early stages of that journey, right now it’s about providing value to people in the cryptocurrency ecosystem,” says Soto-Wright.
Adidas launched a pair of limited edition sneakers as NFTs, meaning- unlike virtual garments and accessories – one could have both a physical pair of sneakers “and a corresponding digital twin”.
MoonPay was the payment facilitator. On the blockchain these were “provably scarce, minted and issued”.
By way of example, if a merchant wants to build a web 3 experience around that particular customer, and they have the wallet information from a previous interaction or purchase, then this NFT as well as other purchase histories from other outlets will be in this wallet, as well as other rich information.
Essentially, this just builds on merchant loyalty and personalisation programmes as we know them today, but it becomes an area which will allow some retailers to push the dial and create a literally other-worldly experience.
True, high-end fashion is where this could play out in glorious vacuity but where fashion meets art, things can get very colourful indeed.
It would be remiss not to mention the data privacy controls that would and should be available to customers on their wallets, such that they may turn off visibility.
And indeed, if the metaverse takes off, after time privacy might become just as much an issue as it does here on, shall we say, physical Earth.
After all, even in the early days of web and mobile applications, most things were public by default, for example payments made on Venmo were visible for any user to see.
Items such as the Adidas NFT sneakers have such cachet, they become a marketing campaign in their own right.
But back to merchants and highly customised, dynamic, slick wallet and payment experiences.
For all the figures there are on crypto acceptance and adoption, there are corresponding figures on the reasons for lack of acceptance by merchants.
In a recent survey conducted by Xero in Singapore, of 1,000 adults and 506 small business leaders, just under half extolled the virtues of adopting new payment methods in the last 6-12 months.
Benefits included reduced time to be paid, higher business retention, increased sales, accessing new customer bases and reduced time chasing late payments.
What’s more, when asked specifically how they felt on a chart about digital currencies and crypto, 56% were excited or optimistic.
Fifty-nine per cent cited excitement or optimism about augmented reality payments and holographic payments.
This is on a chart where Terrified and Indifferent featured as the less enthusiastic options, and where bartering also featured as a bone fide payment option.
Rather them than me on that latter point.
Full marks, Xero, for offering terror as a genuine sentiment with regard to payment innovation. It is terrifying.
I am not wholly convinced myself. But the more is learned, the more the peripheral benefits may be untapped for all parties.
According to Soto-Wright, banks will eventually start to accept transactions.
“We have seen shifts in some of the policies with certain banks that outright rejected crypto and are now under pressure from their consumers and starting to change course on it,” he said.
Clear regulatory guidance is needed. He remains “bullish” over the long term about it.
“What happened in telecoms is what exactly is going to happen to money. User experience is going to continue to improve and you’ll see far more transactions settling peer-to-peer over cryptocurrency.
The wallet will become much more efficient, much easier to use than your bank account,” and that, as he says, is highly disruptive.
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