Square, Stripe take a fresh swing at crypto payments

• Key insight: Payment firms such as Stripe and Block are building scale for cryptocurrency payments. 
• What's at stake: The Genius Act has brought more businesses and consumers into the digital asset market, creating potential demand.
• Forward look: The number of stores that accept crypto payments is increasing, though still a small percentage of all merchants.

Cryptocurrency is rarely used to buy things, but there are still payment companies building networks in anticipation of demand.

Crypto.com, for example, has integrated with Stripe to enable merchants to accept payments through Crypto.com. Stripe converts the payments into a business' local currency, where it is deposited into the merchant's bank account. "We firmly believe that increasing the everyday utility of cryptocurrencies is central to truly mainstreaming crypto," Joe Anzures, general manager of the Americas and executive vice president of payments at Crypto.com, told American Banker. 

Who's buying?

The number of consumers who use crypto for payments in the U.S. rose 25% to 4.9 million adults in 2025, according to eMarketer, which counted stablecoins and traditional cryptocurrency such as bitcoin. 

Stripe's public relations office said the Crypto.com partnership is its first integration with a cryptocurrency exchange, though Stripe does support stablecoins. Crypto.com's other partners include Shopify, PayPal and Visa. Stripe has about 1.3 million merchants, according to Capital One. The integration supports cryptocurrencies including bitcoin and ether, and stablecoins including USDC, PYUSD, and others. "Consumers are increasingly digital and eager to engage with digital assets, and commerce continues to become increasingly online and borderless," Anzures said. "Embracing crypto and digital currencies is embracing the future of the economy."

Crypto.com's PayPal partnership supports payments via PayPal's PYUSD stablecoin, while Crypto.com's branded prepaid Visa card enables users to pay with crypto across Visa's network. 

These firms are chasing a market that is mostly potential. The percentage of U.S. consumers who report using cryptocurrency for payments — purchases, money transfers, or both — is small, fluctuating between two and three percent between 2021 and 2024, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City report issued in September. Anzures is betting the boost in attention following stablecoin legislation over the past year will spark adoption. Banks have ramped up discussion of digital assets over the past year, but most of the use cases involved using blockchain, the technology that underpins cryptocurrency, for other purposes, such as custodial services for stablecoins or to add speed to cross-border transfers. The more people use crypto or digital assets in general, the more they will be amenable to using the coins for payments, according to Anzures. 

"As these consumers have continued to have access to safe and seamless technologies to enable utility-like payments, we expect the growing trend of crypto payments to continue to increase," Anzures said.

Who's selling?

As of early January, there are more than 20,000 merchants globally that accept bitcoin payments directly, according to BTC Map, an open source tracker. That's a negligible portion of the total number of merchants, but it is growing quickly — the number of merchants was about 11,000 at the start of 2025. It also doesn't count the number of payments made in cryptocurrency but converted to traditional money before the point of sale. 

"It's difficult to tell how many payments are being made in bitcoin," said Brandon Karpeles, a former senior vice president at Wintrust who recently became chief executive of Sovreign, a Chicago-based startup that sells technology that enables small businesses to accept bitcoin payments through Square, Block's merchant-facing unit. 

"It really depends on the business owner and how comfortable they are with bitcoin and what portion of their treasury they are willing to keep in bitcoin," Karpeles said. 

Square in October introduced Square Bitcoin, which enables businesses to accept bitcoin payments directly, convert bitcoin to traditional currency and convert fiat payments to bitcoin. Block, which has about 4 million sellers globally, did not say how many merchants have added Square Bitcoin.

"The use cases for crypto payments are still very niche. The primary use case for cryptocurrency payments remains cross-border transactions," Tony DeSanctis, senior director at Cornerstone Advisors, told American Banker. "However, there is uncertainty about how to build and support the infrastructure for crypto payments in small-dollar domestic transactions," he said. 

Block has long advocated cryptocurrency, with a particular focus on bitcoin. Block in the past year has rotated funding out of TBD, the company's shuttered decentralized finance unit, putting more resources behind the company's bitcoin wallet and mining initiative. Block also gets a portion of its revenue from investing in bitcoin, and its Cash App supports bitcoin transactions. Block CEO Jack Dorsey has personally pushed bitcoin, saying it would support a broad-based internet financial system. 

"Square is married to bitcoin more than most payment providers," DeSanctis said. "The most likely scenario is an increase in broad-based stablecoin solutions like Tether and USDC, with mass adoption and low-cost processing already built in. That said, I think crypto payments will be a slow adoption and will be largely driven by cross border transactions."