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With the rise of Web3 and DeFi, businesses are exploring different ways to accept cryptocurrencies as payment. Among the available options, crypto payment gateways are fast emerging as the easiest and most efficient solution. In this post, we’ll compare crypto payment gateways to simply accepting crypto by posting a wallet address, and explain why businesses should opt for gateways.
While sending crypto from one’s own wallet to a merchant’s can require significant technical skill and expertise, payment gateways deliver a streamlined experience to merchants and customers, providing intuitive interfaces and transaction procedures. These gateways often offer quick payment methods such as QR code scanning, with these codes functioning as alternate representations of wallet addresses, letting users transact simply by scanning them.
Moreover, online merchants using payment gateways instead of simply posting their wallet addresses provide customers with a less cluttered checkout experience, as they won’t have to scroll to their crypto payment method to find the right address. Moreover, these merchants won’t have to constantly update their prices due to the changing value of popular cryptocurrencies, as the gateways can adjust prices automatically for every accepted token.
Merchants accepting crypto by posting their wallet addresses have no easy way of identifying and tracking their payments. Under this method, only the long wallet addresses of payers can be used to identify transactions, making orders difficult to track. The transaction details themselves can take significant technical skill to find as well, since they require knowledge of how to navigate a blockchain explorer.
By contrast, one key advantage of crypto payment gateways is their informative user interfaces and helpful features that allow users to easily track and settle their payments without dealing with blockchain viewing platforms. Here’s a closer look at how these interfaces facilitate these actions:
Transaction History and Details
Crypto gateways offer users a comprehensive transaction history that displays all payment details in an organized manner. Users can view essential data like transaction dates and times, payment amounts, sender and receiver addresses, and transaction status. This info lets users keep track of their Web3 payment activities, and reconcile them with their records.
Payment Analytics and Reports
Many crypto payment gateways also offer financial analytics and reporting features. Users can access comprehensive reports that give insights into their payment activities. For instance, the analytics provided by the Pelago payment gateway includes data such as aggregate payment volumes, popular payment methods, as well as transaction trends over 24-hour, weeklong, or monthly periods. Such insights can inform business decisions and improve financial planning.
Crypto payment gateways offer a streamlined integration process that simplifies setting up crypto payments. Through user-friendly APIs and plugins, installing a crypto payment gateway into existing e-commerce systems becomes seamless. For brick-and-mortar businesses, integration usually requires no special hardware, as transactions can be made entirely by smartphone or other mobile device.
Pelago also offers a fast setup of plugins and API with no lengthy KYC process. Moreover, the developer-friendly decentralized payment protocol can seamlessly integrate with Web 3.0 dApps for future use cases.
Crypto gateways offer businesses the ability to accept payments in a wide range of cryptocurrencies. They typically support major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and popular stablecoins, allowing businesses to cater to a broad customer base. And, as mentioned, gateways enable this broad acceptance while still ensuring a tidy interface, quick transaction experience, and automated price updates.
Another advantage of crypto payment gateways is the ability to convert crypto payments into traditional fiat currencies. Many gateways offer conversion services that allow businesses to settle payments in their preferred fiat currency. This mitigates the volatility risk associated with cryptocurrencies, ensuring stable cash flows.
Crypto payment gateways prioritize security capitalizing on the robustness of blockchain technology and cryptographic protocols. By utilizing decentralized networks, encryption techniques, and tamper-proof smart contracts, these gateways provide a secure crypto payment environment.
For example, payments made directly via wallet addresses expose transaction details and those affiliated addresses to the blockchain. Anyone who records the wallet addresses the merchant has posted for accepting crypto could thus view their transaction histories on the blockchain. The Pelago gateway, on the other hand, prevents this by identifying merchants with a unique DID (or decentralized identifier) rather than their wallet address so that blockchain viewers cannot trace merchant wallets to their transaction histories. At the same time, the gateway uses zero-knowledge proofs to encrypt the transaction details themselves, so blockchain viewers cannot see sensitive info on merchants’ received crypto payments.
Crypto payment gateways offer businesses the easiest and most efficient solution when it comes to accepting Web3 payments. With streamlined integration processes, support for a wide range of cryptocurrencies, simplified customer experiences, and other unique benefits, crypto payment gateways outshine other methods. By embracing this technology, businesses can unlock the benefits of Web3 payments and tap into the expanding digital economy.
