Crypto Adoption Among Payment Portals 

Crypto adoption benefits from opportunities for everyday internet users to make the convenience of crypto work for them. Payment gateways and online businesses have been in the crosshairs of the blockchain, placing crypto as a prime disruptive technology for online payments.

Blockchain transactions can be far faster than traditional banking processes and can do away with the necessity for pricey monthly fees for personal or merchant accounts. Many of the best payment gateways have integrated crypto, offering the ability to spend with crypto instead of with a credit card.

As crypto adoption among centralized payment gateways grows, it is increasingly important for users to have access to decentralized crypto trading tools with sufficient liquidity. The current fragmentation of the crypto landscape is an obstacle that stands in the way of this, which Orion Protocol offers to solve.

Orion aggregates liquidity across all crypto exchanges, giving users a single secure and decentralized point of access to the crypto landscape. Let’s take a deeper look at how Orion can put crypto users in the driver’s seat in a world of growing adoption for payment gateways of 2022.

The benefits of crypto adoption for payments

In the earlier stages of adoption, crypto was often seen as a promising landscape lacking real-world use cases. While enthusiasts and investors recognized the value of integrating cryptocurrency into their lives, the functionality was more abstract for others. 

Increasing integration of payment options among payment gateway providers has meant users across the world have been able to benefit from buying and selling goods and services using their crypto of choice.

How online payment processing tools have integrated cryptocurrencies

According to a report from Checkout.com, around forty percent of survey participants between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five planned to use crypto as an online payment gateway for goods and services in 2022.

This would have been unthinkable only a few short years ago, which is a testament to how far crypto adoption has come in recent years. A higher number of survey participants are excited about crypto used for payments, not simply as an investment. 

Payment Gateway Providers Offering Crypto Support

Visa

In 2021, Visa piloted transactions that are settled in stablecoins on the Ethereum blockchain, accepting settlements in USDC. This is a step towards cryptocurrencies being treated by payment processing giants as core currencies that hold equal weight to fiat currencies.

Blockchain technology offers a path towards a decentralized financial infrastructure that offers a user-centered experience for anyone with an internet connection. The payment gateway experience offered by companies like Visa, on the other hand, is largely centralized, and even the best payment gateway will likely feature the pitfalls of traditional banking. 

Visa's Crypto Debit Cards

Recently, Visa has been releasing crypto debit cards alongside centralized crypto exchanges, including Crypto.com and Binance. These cards allow users to mobilize their crypto in stores and online in the same way that traditional debit cards mobilize users’ fiat.

These crypto cards tend to offer rewards and ease of use, but they include sacrifices on users’ ends in terms of centralization. 

Google

Google has been embracing blockchain-based technology and will allow customers to pay for cloud services using crypto. Allowing for crypto payments for cloud services offers Google a competitive edge over similar cloud services that don’t allow crypto payments. In this way, increased crypto adoption can strongarm large corporations into seeing the value of embracing digital assets.

Google's Partnership with Coinbase

Google has been forming a strong partnership with Coinbase; Coinbase will help facilitate the crypto transactions made for cloud services, while Coinbase will make use of Google’s cloud infrastructure too. 

Coinbase Commerce currently supports ten of the largest cryptocurrencies, and Coinbase will take a cut of transactions that go through it. As is the case with Visa, Google’s embracing of crypto is centralized to the point of negating many of the initial benefits of the blockchain.

However, the surge of interest and awareness that moves of this magnitude represents a positive step in the future of digital assets, bolstered by initiatives like Orion, which allows non-custodial access to cryptocurrencies and deep liquidity—two pain points seen in the adoption of digital currencies today.

PayPal

Among centralized processing providers, PayPal has been among the most forward-thinking. In 2022, they announced account holders can send and receive cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum on their personal or merchant accounts. These transfers take place quickly and don’t involve interchange plus pricing costs in the form of flat rate pricing, a monthly fee, or transaction fees beyond the scope of gas fees. 

PayPal can transfer cryptocurrencies between other wallets and exchanges using PayPal, in addition to purchasing crypto on the platform, which has been a PayPal feature for longer.

PayPal is the default checkout merchant on sites like eBay, and the ability to move crypto assets onto PayPal to make transactions can benefit crypto users. However, PayPal’s crypto wallet is custodial, meaning users don’t control their private keys and ultimately don’t have control over their cryptocurrencies.

Orion Protocol allows connectivity with numerous non-custodial wallets that allow users to maintain ownership over their digital assets. Other well-established payment gateways that are integrating crypto payments onto their platforms include Stripe, Venmo, and Apple Pay.

Perils of increased centralization among payment gateway providers

There has been a leap of faith among large-scale institutional merchants taking steps toward fully embracing crypto payment solutions.

Typically, crypto transaction support on a personal or merchant account involves conversions to fiat, incurring a processing fee.

The limits of fiat settlement for online transactions

While this does represent a step forward in crypto adoption, the next step will be allowing for payments to be settled using cryptocurrencies themselves.

A settlement process that avoids settling in fiat currency avoids the cost of additional conversions, which can cost a few cents per transaction. Companies like Visa have been moving towards allowing partners to settle in stablecoins including USDC. 

Meanwhile, some third-party tools aim to offer more of a decentralized experience. Orion Bridge lets users trade assets across blockchains without delays, refused orders, a monthly fee, limits, or blocked funds, providing cross-exchange liquidity aggregation—perhaps paving the way for a future wherein crypto transactions are settled in crypto.

Orion Protocol and the future of crypto and payment gateways

Many are taking it as a promising sign that major financial institutions have seen the need to embrace crypto-based payments. In the past, the fragmentation of networks and liquidity in the crypto market has limited the scale and rate of adoption, but this should not be the case.

Orion unifies disparate tokens and exchanges, maintaining the benefits of decentralization while providing a simple, user-friendly experience. You can learn more about how Orion is fostering crypto adoption on Orion’s YouTube video series.

Orion's trading Terminal combines the most elite crypto exchanges (such as Binance, OKX, KuCoin, Curve, Uniswap, PancakeSwap, SpookySwap, QuickSwap and AscendEX) into one place for exponential scaling of deep liquidity. The liquidity needed for scaling a global payments infrastructure becomes achievable through Orion's ability to combine the industry's fragments exchanges together. Orion is therefore crucial in the unification and progression of the crypto industry on a global scale both now and in the future years ahead.