Crypto payments are having a moment.
Even Wall Street’s biggest names, including JPMorgan and Visa, are busily incorporating stablecoin rails into their tech stacks, finally bowing to a superior technology that can transfer value trustlessly and (near) instantly worldwide.
And all this is great, except…
There’s a flipside nobody talks about: the UX is stuck in beta.
It makes even the sanest of folks want to gouge out their eyeballs with a blunt spoon.
Why?
POV: crypto payment providers are rapidly being co-opted by regulators and TradFi, bogged down in cumbersome practices like KYC and KYB, and strangled in red tape.
After nine years of reporting on crypto and being paid in every token under the sun, it’s a sad reality that receiving crypto payments has become harder, not easier, despite the prevailing narrative to the contrary.
Case in point. I recently had a UK-based client with a Gemini account who wanted to send a payment in USDC to my OKX address in Dubai.
After weeks of back and forth, trying to unfreeze her business account and supply additional necessary KYB documents, she gave up, deciding that Revoult to my bank account would be faster.
If that statement wasn’t depressing enough already, here’s the hammer blow:
It was also cheaper for her to send the payment—and cheaper for me to receive it.
As for OKX? There isn’t any real incentive to do better in the UAE since all providers charge a flat crypto-to-fiat withdrawal fee of 75 AED (around $20).
And while many industry participants are grateful for the regulatory clarity, some of us now have to stomach the double conversion: you can’t cash out to fiat from USDC in the UAE, and you can’t get paid in Tether in Europe.
Face palm.
Don’t even get me started on being crypto native. Try telling a normie that if you accidentally select the wrong network out of an ever-expanding list of options, you’ll lose all your money forever.
Or if you leave your funds on an exchange that gets hacked, you’ll lose all your money forever.
Or if you decide to self-custody and lose your seed phrase, you’ll…
Ay! Revolut, anyone?
You get the idea. Hype? It couldn’t be hypier. UX? The absolute pits.
Just another banking platform, only harder to use and more expensive, with no backup or guarantees. It feels like crypto payments are still under construction.
That’s not to say crypto payments are doing nothing right. They work pretty well transferring value within national borders. But then, so do banks.
The GENIUS Act has finally provided regulatory clarity for stablecoin issuers after years of flying blind, and it walks the tightrope pretty well: regulators want consumer protection and anti-money laundering guarantees. Markets want clear rules on what constitutes a security. The GENIUS Act delivers both.
So why does crypto payment UX still send a shiver down our spines? Aren’t blockchain transactions supposed to be cheaper and faster?
“This is a fair concern, and one we hear often from users who are navigating the world of wallets and exchanges that aren’t optimized for low-fee crypto transfers. In many cases, high costs come down to poor fee transparency, suboptimal network choices, and cash-out platforms that charge high spreads or withdrawal fees.”
He explains that BitPay’s approach is different, focused on reducing points of friction to integrate support for cost-efficient networks like Polygon, Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism. While it’s still ‘select the wrong network at your peril’, at least the fees don’t make you wince.
“Users can send and receive payments with significantly lower confirmation fees than on legacy networks like Ethereum or Bitcoin.”
Network selection is a crucial factor, as fees can be unpredictable, and network congestion has been known to cause gas fees to skyrocket.
While most retail users still rely on centralized exchanges, they routinely charge flat withdrawal fees, a la OKX. $20 is typical for cashing out, making small payments impractical.
Ben Weiss is the CEO of CoinFlip, a longstanding crypto-native company that owns and operates more than 6,000 Bitcoin ATMs worldwide. After a decade of operating in this industry, he’s observed how crypto payments have evolved, sharing:
“A lot of [crypto payments] is a flat fee. So if you’re sending Bitcoin, you might pay the same fee for sending $1 million as for $5… Crypto doesn’t work as well for smaller payments. That’s starting to change, but real efficiency takes time. There’s still a lot of work to be done on the interface and usability. That lags a couple of years behind the core technology.”
Many DeFi rails are cheaper, but they require users to navigate arcane wallets and private keys, or bridge between networks. Normies have left the building.
Another hurdle for crypto payments is custody. Blockchain enables truly peer-to-peer transactions and individual sovereignty, letting anyone be their own bank. But most people don’t want to be their own bank.
Self-custody remains a nightmare for the uninitiated, and many people don’t understand the need to retain financial control, if they’ve never had their account frozen or been systematically debanked. Weiss reflects:
“Not everyone wants to self-custody or figure out how to open up a cold storage wallet to send or receive crypto; they might just want to buy an ETF. In general, I’m for anything that makes the industry bigger, and gets more people into crypto. There’s no right or wrong way.”
Zeilke adds:
“The core challenge today is still UX. Things like setting up wallets, high network fees, or fear of sending assets to the wrong address create friction for everyday users. But we’re already seeing major improvements, especially with stablecoins and Layer-2 networks, which are dramatically reducing fees and settlement times.
We’re not fully there yet, but the foundation has been laid and the framing is underway. With regulatory clarity improving and infrastructure becoming more user-friendly, we’re moving closer to a future where crypto payments are as intuitive as tapping a card.”
And until sending crypto payments is as simple as tapping a credit card, it will never take off as the preferred way to transact value worldwide.
And as TradFi rushes to “blockchainify” its systems, are we watching banks absorb crypto tech rather than crypto replacing banks?
UX fails, hidden costs mount, and when you finally want to cash out, you find fees as punitive as wire transfers. Zielke reflects on the challenge:
“Mass adoption takes time, but I believe we are on the right path. It took decades for credit cards to become the norm, largely because it required trust, consistent infrastructure improvements, and a refined user experience. Crypto payments are following a similar trajectory, but at a much faster rate.”
So, where are we headed? The trendlines are clear: more institutional adoption, more stablecoin rails, more regulatory compliance, and an ever-increasing use of crypto for large-value payments and cross-border commerce.
Yet the road to the frictionless everyday payments experience (the one that puts crypto on par with tapping a credit card) remains long and winding.
The hurdles are no longer just technical or regulatory, but experiential. Crypto needs to consistently undercut banks, especially for small payments, and sending and receiving must be simple, transparent, and error-tolerant.
Crypto payments aren’t winning because crypto is easy; they’re winning because the old system is still slow, closed, and uninclusive. While we can take the win, we can also acknowledge significant room for improvement. Winning by default isn’t the same as winning by design.
