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July 1 has passed a week ago. And with it, the MiCA transitional period.Since the start of this month, the Article 143 a...
07/07/2026

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.

“We want to pay partners in crypto. We just don't want to hold crypto.”We hear this from finance teams constantly, and i...
02/07/2026

“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.

Vendor due diligence used to skip the crypto payment provider. A quick fee comparison, a look at the website, done. MiCA...
01/07/2026

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.

Do you actually know where your crypto-paying customers are? Because the answer should decide which coins and networks y...
30/06/2026

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.

A European hosting provider kept losing customers in Africa and the Middle East. Their customers' card payments simply w...
29/06/2026

A European hosting provider kept losing customers in Africa and the Middle East. Their customers' card payments simply wouldn't go through.

MVPS.net tried to fix it the hard way first: accepting Bitcoin directly to their own wallet. It backfired. They held BTC through price drops and lost money on it, while their bank started questioning funds arriving from crypto exchanges.

Here's the part worth remembering... the problem was never crypto itself. It was the setup.

Today MVPS.net accepts crypto through us. Payments settle in EUR, so there's nothing volatile sitting on their balance sheet. And because we're Europe-based and MiCA-licensed, their bank treats the settlements like any other payment income.

The result: 24% of MVPS.net customers now pay with crypto. Nearly one in four. USDC leads (their customers specifically requested it), alongside TRX, BTC, and LTC.

If card failures in specific regions are quietly costing you customers, that's not the price of selling globally. It's a fixable problem, and this story shows the fix in detail.

A year and a half ago, USDC was a marginal option at our checkout. 2.5% of stablecoin payments in 2024. That was it.In 2...
25/06/2026

A year and a half ago, USDC was a marginal option at our checkout. 2.5% of stablecoin payments in 2024. That was it.

In 2025, it reached 44.2% of all stablecoin payments, with order volume up 1,264% year-over-year. And on the payout side, USDC now carries 83.4% of everything our merchants send out.

What happened in between wasn't a marketing campaign. It was MiCA. USDT didn't meet EU requirements and was phased out across regulated providers, including us. Businesses needed a compliant stablecoin and moved fast. USDC, with Circle holding MiCA licensing and monthly Deloitte-audited reserves, was the obvious destination.

There's a practical takeaway here. If your customers ask about paying in stablecoins (and in industries like proxies, where crypto already makes up 30–75% of payments, they do), USDC is the one to enable first.

Through our checkout it works across Ethereum, Solana, Base, Polygon, and BSC, with network routing handled automatically. You can settle in EUR or USD instantly, keep USDC, or split between the two. The processing fee is 1%, with no hidden conversion spreads.

We wrote a setup guide covering all of it, from choosing settlement currency to plugins and API.

One crypto order every 22 seconds.That was the pace at our checkout in 2025. 1.42 million payments processed during the ...
23/06/2026

One crypto order every 22 seconds.

That was the pace at our checkout in 2025. 1.42 million payments processed during the year, adding to more than 7 million since 2014.

But the volume isn't the interesting part of our yearly data report. The interesting part is what merchants did after the money arrived.
Settlements in crypto rose from 27% to 37.5%. Stablecoin settlements grew from 16.7% to 25.2% of all orders. And 85% of merchants now execute payouts via API rather than by hand.

In other words, businesses stopped treating crypto as a checkout experiment. They hold it, convert it strategically, and use it to pay partners and suppliers. Crypto quietly became working capital.

For anyone evaluating crypto payments in 2026, this is the context that matters. The question is no longer “will customers pay this way?”. It's “what will we do with the funds once they do?”.

The full report covers currency rankings, blockchain usage, shopper geography, and settlement behavior. Worth a read before you plan anything for this year.

This is not a "crypto is better" post. Cards process billions of transactions every day and power most of the global eco...
22/06/2026

This is not a "crypto is better" post. Cards process billions of transactions every day and power most of the global economy. That’s not up for debate.

But cards come with trade-offs that merchants have accepted as normal because there wasn’t a meaningful alternative. High processing fees. Chargebacks. Declined transactions. Slow settlement. They’re friction baked into a system built decades ago.

Here’s how the two actually compare:

Fees. A typical online card transaction costs around 2.9% + $0.30. Add cross-border surcharges of 1-1.5% for international sales. Crypto processing? 1% flat. No per-transaction add-ons, no cross-border premiums. On a $1,000 international sale, crypto costs roughly 70% less.

Chargebacks. With cards, anyone can dispute a charge weeks later. You defend yourself or lose the money and the product. With crypto, transactions are final. Refunds are still your responsibility, but forced reversals don’t exist.

Declines. Card decline rates sit between 5% and 15% depending on the market. For digital goods and high-risk MCCs, it’s worse. Crypto has no issuer in the middle deciding whether to approve.

Speed. Cards authorize instantly but settle in 1 to 3 business days. Crypto confirms in minutes and will settle the same day.

International. Cards were built for domestic transactions with international add-ons. Crypto doesn’t have borders. A customer in Lagos pays the same way as a customer in London.

Where cards still win. Small domestic purchases. Recurring billing. Customer familiarity. If your entire audience has zero crypto exposure, pushing a new payment method creates friction rather than removing it.

The smart answer for most merchants: offer both. Cards for mainstream customers who expect them. Crypto for the transactions that cards handle poorly or can’t handle at all.

Sharing a few moments from our amazing workation in Spain☀️
18/06/2026

Sharing a few moments from our amazing workation in Spain☀️

Quick reminder for anyone sitting on crypto and wondering where to actually spend it.We have a Merchant Directory where ...
17/06/2026

Quick reminder for anyone sitting on crypto and wondering where to actually spend it.

We have a Merchant Directory where you can browse hundreds of businesses that accept crypto payments through CoinGate.

It covers a wide range of categories: VPN providers, web hosting, proxy services, gaming, travel, marketing tools, domain registrars, and more. You can filter by category, search for specific merchants, or just browse what’s available.

Some names you might recognize:

• NordVPN – cybersecurity and VPN
• Hostinger – web hosting
• IPRoyal – residential and datacenter proxies
• Cherry Servers – dedicated servers and cloud hosting
• Alternative Airlines – flight booking

Payments are supported in BTC, USDC, ETH, LTC, TRX, and more across 11 blockchain networks including Lightning Network, Tron, Arbitrum, Base and Polygon.

The directory keeps growing as more merchants join, so it’s worth bookmarking if you’re someone who prefers paying with crypto when the option is there.

Browse the directory → https://coingate.com/stores

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