Why Stablecoins Are the Cheapest Payment Rail Merchants Still Ignore

U.S. merchants paid $187 billion in card processing fees last year.

Stablecoins could eliminate most of that. Yet 95% of online checkouts still don’t offer them as a payment option.

The infrastructure is already here.

Shopify has made it dead simple. Merchants across 34 countries can accept USDC payments through Shopify Payments. No new gateway. No integration work. Customers pay with any of 480+ crypto wallets, while merchants receive their local currency with zero foreign exchange fees. Shopify even offers a 0.5% rebate on USDC transactions.

“Stablecoins could eliminate most card processing fees — yet almost no checkout pages surface them.”

The Economics Are Obvious

Card processors typically charge 1.5% to 3.5% per transaction.

Stablecoin payments often cost a few cents total.

For a business doing $10 million in annual revenue, that’s $150,000 to $350,000 in card fees versus near-zero costs using stablecoins.

This works because the payment infrastructure already handles the complexity merchants care about.

Stripe and Coinbase built the payment protocols that make this viable at scale: authorise now, capture later, tax finalisation, inventory reservation, refunds — all the messy parts of commerce, but settled on-chain in seconds instead of days.

“The UX gap has closed. The rails already work.”

The Rails Already Exist

PayPal’s PYUSD processes merchant payments at 0.99% fees. BitPay enables USDC and USDT settlement on Solana with next-day fiat conversion.

The rails aren’t missing. Adoption at the checkout page is.

This isn’t about replacing cards entirely.

It’s about adding one more option.

Stablecoins sit alongside Apple Pay and credit cards. For a customer in Argentina buying from a U.S. store, or a freelancer in Vietnam getting paid by a European client, stablecoins are often the fastest and cheapest option available.

“This is about payment rails — not speculation.”

Why Early Merchants Are Benefiting

Merchants adopting stablecoin checkout are seeing immediate operational advantages:

Mastercard has integrated stablecoin support into its merchant infrastructure. Visa has launched products enabling stablecoin spending at 80+ million merchants globally.

Newer infrastructure players like Bridge, BVNK, and KAST are building stablecoin-linked Visa cards that can be used at 150 million merchant locations worldwide.

What’s Actually Holding This Back

This shift isn’t driven by crypto believers or blockchain maximalists.

It’s driven by CFOs looking at payment processing costs and asking why they’re paying 2.5% when an alternative exists that costs close to zero.

For most businesses, accepting stablecoins is now easier than handling international wire transfers. Wallet UX is simple. Settlement is instant. The technology works.

What’s missing is normalisation.

Customers need to see “Pay with USDC” next to “Pay with Card” often enough that it stops feeling novel. Merchants need to understand this isn’t about volatility — it’s about faster and cheaper payment rails than what we’ve relied on for decades.

This is a familiar pattern in financial infrastructure adoption — clarity and distribution matter more than hype, a theme I’ve explored often.

“The businesses adding stablecoin checkout in 2026 won’t be early adopters — they’ll be catching up.”