Crypto Payments Are Back. Will Merchants Actually Care This Time?

Crypto means a lot of things to merchants and payment service providers (PSPs). But for the first time, it might actually mean opportunity.

With MoneyGram launching its stablecoin wallet in El Salvador Wednesday (April 22) as the start of a broader Latin American rollout, and DoorDash on Tuesday (April 21) saying it will begin offering stablecoin payments to help navigate its “three-sided marketplace” involving consumers, merchants and delivery workers, it’s becoming clear that the crypto ecosystem’s ability to deliver on seamless payment experiences has evolved.

The early promise of crypto payments was a disarmingly simple one of faster, cheaper and borderless transactions. The reality of that earlier era, as merchants quickly discovered, was anything but. Fragmented blockchains, volatile assets, inconsistent user experiences and opaque settlement processes turned what was supposed to be a next-generation checkout feature into an operational burden.

But the trajectory of crypto payments looks increasingly to be aligned, and not at odds, with the broader evolution of financial infrastructure. Also on Wednesday, new U.S. legislation was introduced to establish a federal registration pathway for nonbank providers seeking direct access to the Federal Reserve’s core payment systems, including Fedwire, the FedNow® Service and ACH.

Crypto firms, along with more traditional FinTechs, would be among the biggest beneficiaries of the bill.

More like this: Treasury Calls for Programmable Financial Enforcement Across Crypto

A Transitional Moment for Payments

Merchants have little appetite for blockchain complexity. In traditional payments, providers like Stripe and Adyen built their value on abstraction where one integration was capable of unlocking multiple payment methods, currencies and geographies.

Early crypto payments broke that model, forcing merchants to navigate different chains, wallets and settlement processes.

What has changed is the ecosystem’s ability to deliver on those expectations without requiring merchants to understand blockchain mechanics. Unified application programming interfaces (APIs) now allow transactions to be routed across blockchains without exposing merchants to their differences. A customer might pay with a token on one network, but the merchant experiences a consistent flow: authorization, confirmation and settlement. The underlying complexity—network selection, gas fees, asset conversion—is handled behind the scenes.

Even traditional networks like Visa and Mastercard are exploring blockchain settlement, signaling that no single network will dominate. Instead, competitive advantage is shifting toward the ability to move value seamlessly across systems.

This has led to the rise of middleware layers that manage cross-chain messaging, liquidity and compliance. These layers insulate merchants from fragmentation while enabling PSPs to remain flexible. But they also introduce new operational demands: managing liquidity across ecosystems, ensuring uptime across networks and embedding compliance into increasingly complex transaction flows.

See also: Token Freezes Force CFOs to Rethink Stablecoin Risk

For PSPs, the task may be to build systems that are both adaptable and reliable. For merchants, the opportunity could be to expand payment options without adding operational burden. If interoperability can deliver on its promise—combining flexibility with predictability—crypto payments may finally achieve mainstream relevance by becoming, almost invisibly, part of the existing fabric of commerce.

There are also lessons to be learned from enterprise stablecoin adoption. Findings in “Waiting for Certainty: Why Most CFOs Are Holding Back on Crypto and Stablecoins,” the latest installment of the PYMNTS Intelligence exclusive series, The 2026 Certainty Project, reveal that the majority of CFOs surveyed would prefer to engage with banks, not crypto-native wallets or FinTech intermediaries, when launching a stablecoin strategy.

This aligns with new Federal Reserve research, which showed that most of the stablecoin assets in the marketplace today are not flowing through the real economy. Rather, they are sitting idle or circulating within crypto markets, but not being used to pay for goods and services.

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