CoinGate

The clearest sign a payment method has matured is that nobody talks about it anymore. At Squaretalk, crypto payments reached that point. We went back to ask what changed since we first told their story. The answer was quieter than expected. Crypto stopped being a project. It started running in the background. Their team barely touches it anymore. The median crypto payment confirms in around six minutes, fewer than 1% of orders have ever needed a refund, and chargebacks simply do not exist once a payment settles. In the words of Isaac Levy, their Head of Partnerships and BD, "crypto payments have become a routine and low-maintenance part of our finance operations." But the real shift was regulatory. When we became MiCA-licensed in December 2025, it changed how their legal team treats crypto. Not the technology. The accountability behind it. "It brings the regulatory clarity and institutional credibility we expect from our financial partners," Isaac says. The objection to crypto was never really about tech. It was about who stands behind the payment when an auditor asks. MiCA finally gives that question an answer, and it made Squaretalk's conversations with enterprise clients noticeably easier. Their clients noticed too. For a growing share of Squaretalk's international customers, crypto is now the preferred way to pay, mostly in stablecoins. That mirrors the whole platform. In the first half of 2026, USDC became the single most-used payment asset across CoinGate, edging past Bitcoin. The companies treating crypto as a competitive advantage are no longer the brave ones. They are just early. #CryptoPayments #MiCA #SaaS

Payment channels are live! Until this week, accepting crypto deposits worked one way: new invoice, new address, every single time. Now there's a second way. A payment channel is a permanent blockchain deposit address tied to one client. They deposit whenever they need to, with no checkout and no expiry. Every deposit is detected, attributed to the right client, and settled the way you choose: keep the crypto or auto-convert to EUR, USD, or GBP. No more invoices,expired addresses, no reconciliation spreadsheets quietly growing in someone's downloads folder. Three decisions shaped how we built it. Your clients never create CoinGate accounts or interact with us, the relationship stays yours. Compliance runs underneath, with AML screening on every deposit, Travel Rule data handled in the flow, and a per-client audit trail generated automatically. And channels sit inside the same platform as payments, payouts, and treasury, so there's no extra vendor to onboard. If your business receives repeated deposits from the same clients (ad networks, marketplaces, SaaS, hosting, proxy services), this removes an entire category of work. Channels are enabled on request while we scale access. The announcement covers how it works and how to get started. #CryptoPayments #PaymentChannels #ProductLaunch

For years, BTC was the most-used payment asset at our checkout. In H1 2026, that changed. Our new data report is out, covering 782,403 crypto payments processed between January and June. The short version: stablecoins moved to the front. A few numbers that stood out: USDC finished the half at 22.1%, overtaking BTC at 21.0% as the most-used payment asset. Its share more than doubled in a year, from 9.3% to 22.1%. 75.4% of orders were settled to fiat, and the crypto-settled share has now fallen for three halves in a row. Merchants want predictable cash flow and clean books. 93.2% of payouts ran through the API, up from 83.3% a year earlier. Manual payouts are quietly disappearing. Volume grew 21.4% year over year with no single spike. Crypto payments are behaving less like a campaign and more like infrastructure. The full report covers asset mix, settlement, networks, geography, and a practical checklist for your own setup. Find it in the comment section. #CryptoPayments #Stablecoins #DataReport

Ačiū „CoinGate“ už gerumą, kuris pasiekia pačius mažiausius 💜 Gegužės mėnesį „Coingate“ skyrė paramą Asociacijai „Neišnešiotukas“ ir taip prisidėjo prie mūsų misijos būti šalia neišnešiotų mažylių bei jų šeimų tada, kai palaikymo, rūpesčio ir vilties reikia labiausiai. Jūsų parama – tai ženklas šeimoms, kad jos nėra vienos. Tai galimybė stiprinti pagalbą, kurti daugiau palaikymo ir tęsti darbus dėl pačių mažiausių, kurie į šį pasaulį atkeliauja dar nepasiruošę. Nuoširdžiai dėkojame „Coingate“ komandai už dosnumą, jautrumą ir prisidėjimą prie Neišnešiotukų bendruomenės. Iki mėnulio ir dar toliau! 🌙💜

Layer 2 networks were built to make Ethereum cheaper. On our checkout, they turned into something else entirely: stablecoin rails. The data from our Layer 2 report makes it hard to read any other way. On Base, 58.7% of payments are made in USDC. On Optimism, it's 71.8%. On Polygon, stablecoins passed 70% of all transactions. Meanwhile, ETH's own share on Arbitrum fell from over 50% in 2023 to 23%. Growth followed the same logic. Arbitrum payments grew 565% in 2024. Polygon grew 135% the same year and kept climbing. Base was integrated in February 2025 and became one of our top networks within half a year. What does this tell a business? Customers, when given the option, choose cheap and predictable settlement. Not ideology, not novelty... fees. So here's the practical check: if you accept USDC on Ethereum mainnet only, you're asking customers to pay network fees they've already learned how to avoid. Enabling the L2 versions of the same asset costs you nothing extra through our checkout and meets those customers where they already are. The full report covers all four networks, their growth curves, and where their users come from. #Layer2 #USDC #CryptoPayments

44% of every payment we've processed since 2014 was made in Bitcoin. We pulled eleven years of our own data, and the pattern is almost stubborn. Bitcoin was our first supported currency (for the first years, our only one). It has been the most-used cryptocurrency on the platform every single year except 2024, when USDT briefly took the lead... until MiCA restricted USDT in the EU and Bitcoin was back on top by April 2025. A few details from the report that stuck with us: The average Bitcoin cart is €132, around 53% higher than other cryptocurrencies. Lightning Network peaked at 15.4% of all BTC orders in 2024, and web hosting alone drives over a third of Bitcoin payments this year. And a shift worth watching: in 2025, 25.9% of Bitcoin payments were kept in BTC by merchants instead of being converted, the highest share in four years. Businesses aren't just accepting Bitcoin. Increasingly, they're holding it. Trends came and went around it. Bitcoin's actual product, it turns out, is boring reliability. The full report covers all eleven years. #Bitcoin #CryptoPayments #DataReport

July 1 has passed a week ago. And with it, the MiCA transitional period. Since the start of this month, the Article 143 arrangement that let crypto-asset service providers operate “while applying” is gone. A provider without MiCA authorization can no longer legally offer crypto services in the EU. Not with a pending application, not with a national registration from the old regime. If your provider secured authorization in time, nothing changes for you today. If they didn't, the risk you were warned about last year stopped being theoretical this week. Banking partners, auditors, and enterprise clients now ask a binary question: licensed or not. ESMA said it plainly during the transition: “There are no low-risk CASPs.” Every provider, regardless of size, had to go through full authorization. That was the point. Checking takes minutes. Ask your provider for their authorization code and verify it with the national regulator. However you feel about the regulation itself, the uncertainty phase is over. That part is good for everyone. We broke down what licensed infrastructure means for banking access, enterprise deals, and counterparty risk in a separate blog post. #MiCA #CryptoCompliance #EURegulation

“We want to pay partners in crypto. We just don't want to hold crypto.” We hear this from finance teams constantly, and it's a fair position. Buying a volatile asset in advance, just to send it out later, creates an exposure window nobody asked for. That's exactly the problem FX payouts remove. Your balance stays in EUR. At the moment of payout, funds convert into the asset your recipient needs and go out in a single step. No pre-buying, no holding period, no price risk sitting on your books overnight. Our 2025 data shows how businesses actually use this. When payouts started from EUR balances, 85.4% converted straight into USDC at payout time. And once funds were in USDC, 96.8% of payouts stayed there. Companies found a stable endpoint that recipients accept everywhere, and they stick to it. It works the same whether you send one payout from the dashboard, a few hundred via CSV upload, or thousands through a single API call with webhook tracking. Recipients just need a wallet address, not a CoinGate account. Thinking it's time to simplify how you pay affiliates, contractors, or partners abroad? Start with us. #CryptoPayouts #Treasury #B2BPayments

Vendor due diligence used to skip the crypto payment provider. A quick fee comparison, a look at the website, done. MiCA ended that. Under MiCA, a crypto payment provider is a regulated financial counterparty. Governance structures, internal controls, capital requirements, AML monitoring, incident reporting, record-keeping... all supervised at the provider level. Choosing one is now a risk decision, not a procurement formality. However, there's a side of this that gets less attention. MiCA doesn't remove every risk. Market volatility, conversion timing, and your own internal processes stay exactly where they were: with you. Knowing which risks the license absorbs and which ones remain on your side of the table is the entire game in provider evaluation this year. We went through the authorization ourselves. The Bank of Lithuania granted our MiCA license in December 2025, on top of the Payment Institution license. So when we write about what supervision actually demands, it's from the inside. We broke down what changes for EU businesses, with perspectives from our CEO and our compliance lead, plus a vendor evaluation checklist. #MiCA #VendorRisk #CryptoCompliance

Do you actually know where your crypto-paying customers are? Because the answer should decide which coins and networks you enable. From our global checkout data: the US leads with 23.2% of all orders (H1 2025), followed by Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands. Nigeria has held a top-five spot for years, a reminder that crypto fills real gaps where traditional payment access is limited. The more useful layer is what each market pays with. Bitcoin drives 40% of US purchases, and 54% of all Lightning Network payments originate in the US. India leans heavily on stablecoins. Nigeria shifted toward Litecoin and USDC after the USDT phase-out. Germany spreads across USDT-era holdovers, BTC, and Litecoin. So the practical question for a payments team isn't “should we accept crypto?” in the abstract. It's “which assets and networks match our actual customer map?”. A business selling mostly to the US should care about Lightning. One selling to South Asia or Africa should care about stablecoins and low-fee networks. We compared regions, years, and coin preferences in one report. Useful if global customers are part of your plan. #CryptoPayments #Ecommerce #PaymentTrends