Benefits of Cryptocurrency in Business and When It Pays Off

More businesses start to use cryptocurrency every year, because it brings them a new revenue stream. Beyond cheaper cross-border payments and access to customers outside the banking system, platforms with their own audience now earn directly from crypto by building swaps into the product and taking a cut on every transaction a user makes.

For businesses in-app swaps turn everyday user activity into a revenue line, with a cut on every transaction. This article covers all three uses, highlighting the one where platforms with an existing audience have the most to gain. A short checklist at the very end will help product owners decide whether crypto is worth adding to their own platform.

Key Takeaways

• Only 1% of 200 CFOs at billion-dollar companies said crypto had no place in their long-term plans. About a quarter expect to deploy it within two years.

• A cross-border wire through SWIFT can take up to five days and cost $25-50 plus an FX spread. A stablecoin transfer clears in minutes for a fraction of that.

• For digital platforms, the clearest crypto for business case is embedding swaps and earning a cut of every transaction, without building the exchange yourself.

• Volatility risk is mostly a solved problem with the help of fixed-rate swaps locking in the price.

How Businesses Use Cryptocurrency Today

Businesses mostly use cryptocurrency in three models, each one serving a different purpose and product owner.

• Accepting crypto payments. Someone pays you in Bitcoin or a stablecoin, that you can cash out immediately or hold what you receive. A PayPal survey from January 2026 pegged adoption at 50% for companies earning more than $500 million a year. For smaller firms it was closer to a third.

• Offering crypto services to your own users. PayPal and Venmo let people buy and sell crypto inside their apps. Revolut went further and built it into the core of the product years ago. These are the companies using cryptocurrency as a handy feature, and for platforms that already have an audience in finance, this is where the real revenue sits.

• Treasury and investment. In this case a company keeps Bitcoin or stablecoins on hand as a reserve. Tesla and MicroStrategy were amongst the ones who pioneered such an approach to crypto in industry.

Benefits of Accepting Crypto Payments

If you sell something, accepting crypto for business has a few concrete advantages of cryptocurrency over fiat, cards and bank transfers. This section stays brief – our full guide on crypto payment processing covers the mechanics.

Inside the ChangeNOW Super App, merchant payments run through NOWPayments. It accepts 350+ cryptocurrencies at a 1% base fee and can convert each incoming payment into a stablecoin on arrival, which keeps volatility off the merchant’s books.

Kate Lifshits, CEO of NOWPayments, shares statistics on who accepts crypto, and the mix is shifting. In the company's detailed partner data for January–July 2026, SaaS and web services make up 27.78% of partners, almost level with e-commerce marketplaces at 27.76%. Trading follows at 13.15%, then gambling and iGaming at 6.87% and financial services at 6.35%. Software moved fastest, up from 15.58% a year earlier, and with it comes demand for convenient automatic renewals.

Across these industries, businesses accept crypto for the same practical reasons.

• Faster cross-border payments. A SWIFT wire can take days. It charges a flat fee, and a currency spread on top. The same value sent as a stablecoin shows up in minutes, and usually costs less than a dollar.

• Lower fees. Card processors take 2–3.5% per sale. Crypto processing tends to land under 1%, depending on how you handle conversion. For a high-volume store, that spread turns into real money over a year.

• Lower chargeback risks. Once a crypto payment confirms on-chain, it's done, and there's no 90-day window for a customer to reverse it. For anyone selling digital goods or shipping across borders, where fraud disputes run high, that alone can change the unit economics.

ChangeNOW's Editorial Advisor Xena Kash sees it from the merchant's side and goes deeper on crypto benefits for high-risk businesses:

"Crypto payments solve a real problem for high-risk businesses. Travel agencies, hotels, airlines, the adult industry and dating all fall into this group. Banks and the international financial system see a long gap between payment and service, heavy chargeback volumes and a reputational risk they would rather avoid, so most acquirers decline the account outright. For services like these, crypto becomes a lifeline."

• Access to unbanked customers. Around 1.4 billion adults have little or no access to traditional banking. Crypto gives them a way to pay in places where Visa and Mastercard coverage is thin, across much of Africa and Latin America. Accepting crypto lets your business serve these customers directly.

Kate Lifshits, CEO of NOWPayments, says getting started with crypto payments now takes days rather than months:

"Crypto is becoming quicker for businesses to put to work. At NOWPayments, partners typically reach their first transaction in one to three days, and 65–74% do so within a week. The bigger opportunity, though, is what happens after the payment. When customers can pay, receive money and spend it again in one place, the same payment flow helps a business win new customers and keep them coming back."

For one-off payments, a free ChangeNOW Payment Link lets you request any amount and get paid in 1,000+ cryptocurrencies with no fee on your side. If you need a full payment system with checkout plugins and invoicing, the reliable NOWPayments gateway covers it.

Benefits of Offering Crypto Services to Your Users

The benefits of crypto go well beyond accepting it as payment. Neobanks, wallets and fintech apps build exchange features into the product itself. Content and high-traffic sites work differently, a crypto widget turns audience into revenue where ad formats alone fall short.

• Revenue stream. A user swaps BTC for ETH in your app or buys some USDT – either way you earn a share, often starting near 0.4%. The provider handles routing and liquidity behind the scenes. You’re collecting revenue on activity that would otherwise happen on some other exchange with your user outside your walls.

• User retention. Every time someone leaves your app to swap on an external exchange, that’s a session you lost and might not get back. Keep the swap inside the product and they stay.

Since integrating ChangeNOW Exchange API, a hardware wallet company D’CENT saw their sales revenue in 2025 almost triple in comparison to 2024 results and reached 40,000 daily active users with over a million of registered wallet holders.

• Fiat entry point. A bank card is still how most people make their first crypto purchase. Adding fiat-to-crypto buying makes you meet them at that first step, ahead of any standalone exchange. A neobank or payment wallet can slot it into what the app already does.

• Speed to market. Build it yourself and the whole stack lands on you: liquidity, live trading pairs, compliance and infrastructure that never sleeps on top of it all. An API already spans 1,500+ assets and 90+ networks, and it goes live in one sprint.

ChangeNOW Exchange API for your platform

How Businesses Invest in Cryptocurrency

Large companies are already planning to invest in crypto. Deloitte’s extensive Q2 2025 survey asked CFOs at billion-dollar companies about their plans: nearly a quarter expected to use crypto for payments or investments within two years. For companies past $10 billion in revenue, the figure was around 40%.

Most businesses start small and build a crypto reserve step by step. Before you buy, decide how you’ll store the assets and who in the company can move them.

The simplest way to start is creating a ChangeNOW account. You can buy crypto with a card and keep your whole portfolio in one place, and setup takes about a minute.

Which Platforms Benefit Most

The cryptocurrency advantages of embedding crypto look different depending on what you’re running. You need to start from your business goals to make the product actually better without plugging in useless features no one is going to use.

• Wallets are the obvious case, fintech wallets included. The balances are already there, so a swap feature turns plain storage into something that earns. Ledger and Exodus have done this for years, and fintech wallets like PayPal or Cash App work the same way. The user buys with a card, then swaps between coins in the app, meanwhile the wallet earns at both points.

• Neobanks and fintech apps are next. Revolut made the case with its annual revenue in 2024 rising by 72% to $4 billion in one year. Such growth was made possible by the help of launching Revolut X, their own crypto exchange platform. Smaller neobanks feel the same demand without the budget for a build from scratch.

• Retail gets a different win. Some stores sell goods for their own native token, or paying with it can get special discounts. A built-in swap lets your clients turn any coin into your token on the same page and get a better deal, and every purchase puts more of native token into circulation.

• dApps and Web3 platforms. Users hold assets across different networks and want to move between them without leaving. A handy crypto exchange API handles that, and you skip the cost and risk of maintaining your own bridges.

Disadvantages of Cryptocurrency for Business

No upside comes free, especially since we are talking about cryptocurrency in business. Here are the four things worth weighing, and how teams running crypto in production actually deal with each.

• Price volatility is the one CFOs name first – 43% of them in the Deloitte survey called price swings their main worry. In practice it’s largely handled. Firms that take crypto payments convert to cash or stablecoins the moment a transaction clears. The crypto barely touches the books. Swaps work differently: the rate gets fixed before a user confirms, and volatility stays out of the deal.

• Regulation and tax. The rules shift by country and they change often. The UK, for instance, now requires crypto service providers to collect customer details and report to HMRC as of January 2026, with fines up to £300 per user for getting it wrong. A non-custodial setup lightens the load, since you never hold user funds during a swap, but you still need to check the rules in each market you touch.

• Security. Hold user crypto and you turn into a target as one leaked key can drain everything. A non-custodial model avoids most of this as the provider moves funds between the user and the liquidity source directly, and you never hold them. Check that a provider carries SOC 2 and ISO 27001, which shows an outside auditor has gone through how they operate.

• Choosing the wrong provider. The API behind your product handles real money. One that goes dark during a price spike, or quotes bad rates on a busy pair, costs you user trust that’s hard to win back. Users will blame you, since they can’t see the real backend of their swaps. Before you sign, check the uptime guarantee, the asset count, the response time, whether AML monitoring comes built in, and which established platforms already run on it.

Is Crypto Worth It for Your Business? A Quick Checklist

Six questions. Answer most of them honestly and you’ll know where you stand.

1. Does your audience actually want it? Dig through support tickets and feature requests. Then look sideways at competitors. If two or three platforms near you already offer swaps, the demand is real whether your users have said so out loud or not.

2. How much do you spend moving money across borders? SWIFT runs 3-7% all in on most routes. Crypto rails cut that under 1%. At 500 international payments a month, that gap adds up to six figures across a year. If your cross-border volume is small, the savings are small too, and it’s better to be honest about that early.

Businesses paying contractors or partners abroad can batch those transfers through NOWPayments mass payouts. Payouts to ChangeNOW Account go out by email with no network or service fee, one of our convenient zero-fee crypto payouts.

3. Can your team handle a build, or is no-code the realistic option? An API is a short sprint of engineering. A drop-in widget needs zero code and goes live the same day. Both pull from the same liquidity and pay the same way, so this one comes down to who you have free.

4. Where do you operate? Every market writes its own playbook, so you have to get those rules straight. A non-custodial model makes the picture simpler, though simpler still means a lawyer in each jurisdiction before launch.

5. What does earning look like for you? Revenue sharing, a slice of every swap, often from 0.4%, pays from day one and grows with usage. With markup pricing, you set the spread yourself and widen the margin. Most teams start with the share and add markups once they see which pairs move.

6. One feature or the whole suite? A single crypto exchange API call is enough to begin. See how people actually use it. From there you can add fiat on-ramps and more assets, guided by the usage data instead of a guess.

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