A crypto payment gateway takes a customer's on-chain payment, confirms it, and delivers the value to the merchant — either as crypto on a balance, as a stablecoin, or as fiat in a bank account. The providers below differ less in what they accept than in who holds the money in between, how fast a merchant gets onboarded, and what happens when a payment arrives from a wallet the provider does not like.
Six criteria, applied the same way to every provider: the pricing model and whether the full cost is visible before signing, the range of networks supported for the same asset, onboarding time from documents submitted to first live payment, settlement options at the far end, coverage of merchant categories that card acquirers avoid, and the maturity of the integration surface — plugin, hosted checkout, payment link, API.
Two of these deserve a note. Onboarding time is where most published comparisons stop asking questions, and it is where merchants lose weeks. And network coverage matters more than coin count: a provider listing 300 assets but opening only one network for USDT will reject a large share of real customer payments, because those customers hold the asset somewhere else.
Licensing sits underneath all of it. The consequences of weak controls in this sector are documented rather than theoretical — Canada's financial intelligence unit published an administrative penalty of C$176,960,190 against a crypto payment operator on 16 October 2025 for reporting failures, the largest it has issued (FINTRAC penalty notices). A merchant whose provider is inside that kind of proceeding does not get a warning first.
Speend runs a merchant-side model: the business passes KYB, the payer does not open an account, and the payment arrives from any wallet. Pricing starts at 0.5% with no setup fee, no monthly fee, and network costs passed through at blockchain cost rather than marked up. Volume tiers move the rate down, and there is no minimum turnover to qualify for them; the iGaming tier starts at 0.2%.
The network coverage is the part worth checking against competitors. USDT is open on five rails — Tron, Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, Polygon and Solana — which covers effectively the whole circulating supply of the asset. Bitcoin runs on mainnet, Lightning and SegWit Bech32 addresses by default. Settlement is flexible at the far end: hold the crypto, auto-convert into a stablecoin at the moment of receipt, or withdraw to a self-custodial wallet, an exchange, or a supported banking channel.
Onboarding is the other differentiator. KYB runs 1–3 business days in the general case and 24–48 hours for licensed iGaming operators, technical integration is quoted at 24 hours, and support replies in 10–15 minutes including weekends. On the security side: MPC wallets with no single point where keys assemble, role-based access with a per-operation audit log, on-chain screening on every incoming transaction with flagged funds rejected automatically, cold treasury storage, 24/7 monitoring, and a sandbox that mirrors production one-to-one behind a 99.95% availability SLA.
Best for merchants who want a low headline rate without a volume commitment, need more than one network per asset, and operate in categories where card acquirers apply high-risk surcharges. If your business needs a crypto payment gateway that opens fast and settles in more than one direction, this is the shape of it.
One of the longest-running processors in the category, founded in 2011 and operating as a US money services business. Pricing is tiered by monthly volume, so the effective rate rewards scale and is less attractive at low volume — current bands are published openly. The tooling is broad: REST API, SDKs, e-commerce plugins, point-of-sale, hosted checkout, email invoicing and mass payouts. Its acceptable-use policy excludes several merchant categories outright, gambling among them, so operators in those verticals should read the terms before building anything.
Vilnius-based, founded 2014, and the clearest regulatory paper trail in the group: it holds a MiCA CASP authorisation obtained in December 2025 alongside a Bank of Lithuania payment institution licence. Flat per-transaction pricing with no setup or monthly charge, published openly. Around 70 assets plus Lightning, SEPA settlement in EUR, USD and GBP. The natural choice for European merchants whose compliance function wants a licensed counterparty inside the EEA.
Non-custodial, launched in 2019 by the team behind the ChangeNOW exchange, and the widest asset list in the comparison at 350-plus tokens. Base pricing is low, with discounts tied to verification and partner status. Fiat settlement leans on third-party integrations rather than in-house banking rails, and the company does not hold a MiCA, PI or EMI authorisation at the time of writing — a real consideration for merchants who need a licensed counterparty rather than a technical one.
The crypto payments arm of B2Broker, aimed at enterprise volume: forex and CFD brokers, exchanges, iGaming operators and financial institutions. Volume-banded pricing that reaches the low end of the category at scale, wallet-as-a-service, and white-label orchestration for businesses that want their own brand on the checkout. There is an onboarding charge, and US coverage is absent.
Two enterprise stablecoin specialists rather than general merchant gateways. BVNK settles stablecoin volume for payment companies and payroll platforms; Triple-A is licensed in Singapore and built around fiat settlement for corporates. Both are worth a call above roughly seven figures of monthly volume and are over-specified below it.
Not a provider at all — self-hosted open-source software with no platform fee, where the merchant runs the node and keeps every key. The cost moves from a percentage to engineering time and infrastructure. Sensible for technically staffed businesses with steady volume, difficult for anyone who wants to be live this week.
The single largest disruption was Coinbase closing Coinbase Commerce to merchants outside the United States and Singapore on 31 March 2026, with no extension. The replacement product is custodial and available in those two jurisdictions only. Estimates circulating in trade coverage put the number of stores that lost their crypto checkout at roughly eight thousand, and a large share of the comparison articles still ranking for this topic were written before that date.
The second change is quieter and shows up in the fee line. Network costs measured directly from public RPC endpoints on 26 August 2026 put an ERC-20 USDT transfer near half a cent, a BNB Smart Chain transfer near two tenths of a cent, and a Polygon transfer well under a tenth of a cent, while the same transfer on Tron cost about 41 cents for a sender without staked energy. The rail that the whole industry describes as the cheap default is currently the most expensive of the five. Any gateway that passes network fees through at cost — rather than marking them up — hands that difference to the merchant, and any gateway that opens only one network removes the choice entirely.
Ask which networks are open for the specific asset your customers hold, not how many coins are listed. Ask how network fees are billed: at cost, or with a spread. Ask what happens operationally when on-chain screening flags an incoming payment — whether the order stays open, whether the funds are returned, and who tells the customer. Ask for the KYB timeline in business days and the integration timeline separately, because providers routinely quote the second and leave merchants planning against the first. And ask whether the sandbox behaves like production, because the difference surfaces on your first real settlement rather than in testing.
For a business that has already decided to accept crypto payments and is choosing between shortlisted providers, those five questions separate the field faster than any feature table.
Two layers. A percentage of the transaction, typically between a fraction of a percent and low single digits depending on the provider and volume tier, plus the blockchain network fee. Some providers pass the second through at cost; others add a margin that is not shown on the pricing page.
Not with a merchant-side model. The business completes verification; the customer pays from any wallet. Some providers do require payer-side accounts, which adds friction at checkout — it is worth confirming before integration.
Verification and technical integration are separate clocks. Plugin installs measure in hours, API work in days, and business verification in days to weeks depending on the provider and the merchant category. Providers quoting a single figure are usually quoting the second clock.
Whichever one the customer base already holds the asset on. For USDT that means Tron and Ethereum for most audiences, with BNB Smart Chain and Solana meaningful in specific regions. Opening a second network costs the merchant nothing and removes a common failure mode where a customer sends on a rail the merchant does not support.
Only if the balance is held in a volatile asset. Auto-conversion into a stablecoin at the moment of receipt removes the exposure, and most providers in this comparison offer it.
It depends entirely on custody. With a custodial gateway, merchant funds sit with the provider between payment and payout. With a non-custodial or self-hosted setup, they do not. This is the single question that most changes the risk profile, and it is rarely on the pricing page.
Date: 26.08.2026
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