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28/10/2026

This summer the typical Bitcoin payment at our checkout got about twice as fast. The share of shoppers who picked Bitcoin and then paid barely moved.

Since 28 May we accept Bitcoin payments of up to 100 EUR before they reach a block, once a specialist provider has checked them. Not every payment clears that check, and the ones that don't wait for a block as before. About five in six on-chain Bitcoin orders are that size, so the median across all on-chain Bitcoin fell from nearly 15 minutes to about 7. The slow tail shrank too. Among payments up to 100 EUR, the share taking longer than twenty minutes went from 29.0% to 14.1%.

And roughly the same share of people paid. The wait got shorter for shoppers who were going to pay anyway. It didn't bring in many new ones.
Solana went the other way. On 21 July, Solana orders moved to an address of their own, so there was no memo left to add, forget or mistype. Its median payment time actually got a little slower, from 64 seconds to about 80. Its completion rate jumped. Solana closed a thirty-point gap to Litecoin within a month, from 46.0% of shoppers paying in June to 77.8% in August.

Two changes don't make a law, but they point the same way. A step the shopper can get wrong seems to cost more payments than a few extra minutes of waiting.

If you take crypto, three small updates follow from this. Take any line about a Solana memo out of your help pages and order emails. Keep your Bitcoin support replies patient, because more than one in five payments up to 100 EUR still take longer than fifteen minutes. And if you steered customers away from Solana because of the numbers we published in September, that reason has gone.

Neither change needed anything from merchants. The before and after, measured the same way as our September data, is in the first comment.

27/10/2026

"I paid and nothing happened."

If you take crypto payments, your support team has read that email.

Sometimes the customer is right. They did pay. They sent ETH to an invoice that asked for USDC, or the right coin on a different network from the one they picked.

Usually the money isn't lost. It reached us and we can see it. It just isn't attached to the order, so the invoice keeps waiting, the customer keeps waiting, and the thread begins. Which transaction, which network, which address should it go back to...

Since late September the customer can start that refund themselves, from the invoice page they already paid on. Like every refund, it passes a compliance screen before it goes out.

For your team, that changes the reply. The fastest answer to a wrong-coin email is now the invoice link. Send them back to it.

Two more things worth knowing. The payment never reached your balance, so the refund does not come out of it either. And if the customer still wants the order, the cleanest route is a fresh order in the right coin.

Not every case is that tidy. A payment sent without its memo, long after the invoice expired, or to a different address altogether usually isn't tied to any order, so the invoice won't find it.

The cheapest fix still sits upstream. One line on your checkout page asking customers to match the coin and the network to the invoice heads off plenty of these before they start.

The full walkthrough, with four habits that stop it happening, is in the first comment.

22/10/2026

The usual way to double-check a crypto address is to compare the first few and the last few characters. Address poisoning is built around that one habit.

It doesn't break into anything. The attacker watches the chain for payments you make again and again, generates an address that starts and ends like one you use, and sends you a tiny transfer from it. Now the lookalike sits in your history, right next to the real one. Then they wait for you to copy the wrong line.

It almost never works, which is why it goes out at scale. Chainalysis studied one 2024 campaign that seeded 82,031 lookalike addresses. Only 0.03% of them collected more than 100 dollars from victims. One of them collected about 68 million dollars in wrapped bitcoin in a single transfer. That one was handed back six days later, which is unusual.

A business makes a better target than a person. It pays the same suppliers, affiliates and contractors month after month, often from one wallet, so its history is long and predictable. And a sent payout is final. The only way back is to ask the recipient, and here the recipient is the attacker.

Even the classic test payment doesn't help. It proves an address can receive money, not whose address it is. The attacker will happily receive your test.
What helps is taking the copy-paste out of the routine.

Save the recipient once. You check the address when you add a supplier to your saved payout recipients, then pick them by name every time after that. Nothing gets pasted from history.

Put a second person in front of every batch. With four-eye approval switched on, a batch payout waits for another team member, and whoever created it cannot approve it.

The article also covers links where the recipient types in their own address, and what to do if it has already happened. It's in the first comment.

21/10/2026

We are one of the payment providers that will ask for six months of your bank statements. Read the rest of this with that in mind.

The search for a gateway without KYC makes sense. You want to take crypto payments this week, the onboarding form wants your company registration, your owners and your bank statements, and somewhere a provider promises to skip all of it.

"No KYC" almost always means no check on you, the business receiving the money. In the EU that check is not optional for a licensed provider. Anti-money-laundering rules require us to identify you, who ultimately owns you and what the relationship is for, and then to keep monitoring it.

Skipping it saves an afternoon. The bill tends to arrive later.

Your bank still asks. When money from your crypto sales reaches your business account, the bank wants to know where it came from. A statement from a provider that never identified you is a weak answer.

The questions come back anyway. A provider that skipped onboarding can still review you when a large payment or a withdrawal trips something. Finding six months of statements while your money sits on hold is a lot worse than doing it up front.

What we can do is make the checks less slow, and two things changed this autumn.

Documents get checked as you upload them. Registration documents and bank statements now go through an automated check that usually takes 10 to 30 seconds and runs while you carry on with the form. A wrong or unreadable file comes back flagged with the reason while you are still there, rather than days later. Our compliance team still makes the decision on the application.

You can also build while you wait. A business in review can already create its API key, so the integration can be ready on the day the application is approved. Live payments start on approval, not before.

The article has the full document list and four habits that get an application through the first time.

Thinking it's time to do the paperwork once and get paid? Check out the link in the comment.

14/10/2026

Sell software, licences or hardware to larger companies and sooner or later their procurement team sends you a supplier questionnaire. It’s the long form they want filled in before they sign, and somewhere in it they ask about the third parties you rely on. Your payment provider is one of them.

“We use a crypto payment processor” is the answer that tends to stall there. So does calling it a trusted or regulated one. Those are descriptions, and a risk team can’t verify a description.

What they can verify is three things: a company name, the authority that supervises it, and a licence number they can look up themselves.

For us that’s UAB Decentralized, supervised by the Bank of Lithuania. We’re authorised as a Crypto-Asset Service Provider under MiCA, code LB002323, and separately licensed as a Payment Institution, code LB002324. Both are listed in the Bank of Lithuania’s public register under our name.

That’s the practical change MiCA brought. Before it, a provider could register somewhere with light rules and serve customers everywhere, and a merchant had almost no way to tell a supervised firm from an unsupervised one. Now there’s one authorisation that is valid across the EU, and the number either checks out or it doesn’t.

This matters to IT sellers more than most. IT services and computer hardware businesses together made up 27.4% of every paid order we settled in the twelve months to the end of August. That makes them one of the biggest groups we serve.

One boundary, stated plainly. Accepting crypto as payment for your own goods is generally not a regulated crypto service in itself, so MiCA obligations usually fall on the provider rather than on you. Your own position still depends on what you actually do, and that question belongs with your lawyer.

Plugging it in is the easier part. Most IT businesses bill through software rather than a shop page, and it shows in our numbers. 91.6% of paid orders arrive through our API, and WHMCS is our largest plugin integration by a distance.

Thinking it’s time to add crypto to your billing? Start with us. The full guide, including the three things crypto payments won’t fix, is in the first comment.

13/10/2026

On a six euro order, our fee is six cents. It is the least interesting number in the whole transaction.

What decides whether that order happens at all is everything flat around it. A percentage shrinks with the basket. A fixed cost stays the same size, and at small amounts it turns into a big percentage very quickly.

This is not an edge case for us. The median order arriving through our API over the last twelve months was 13.27 euros, and at the small end of our book the median order is 6.20. Most advice about crypto payments quietly assumes a far more expensive basket.

The flat cost shoppers notice first is the network fee. They pay it on top of the total, and at six euros even thirty cents is suddenly visible. So say it in your own copy before they reach the invoice, and put the fast, cheap networks first.

Speed matters here as much as the fee, because patience scales with basket size. At six hundred euros, a fifteen minute wait is an inconvenience. At six euros it is a reason to close the tab, since finishing is worth very little and walking away costs nothing.

The flat cost on your own side is easier to dodge. SWIFT withdrawals carry a 50 euro minimum fee, and the 0.50% rate only overtakes it above 10,000 euros. For a small-basket business settling in euros, SEPA is free and is the one to use.

And the strongest move is structural. If your product can hold a balance, stop putting a crypto checkout in front of a six euro purchase at all. Let the customer fund fifty or a hundred euros once and spend it down, so the network fee and the wait happen once per top-up instead of once per purchase.

The full checklist for small-basket businesses is in the first comment.

07/10/2026

"Your payment is being processed. Please allow up to 30 minutes."

You have probably seen some version of that line in a support macro. For Bitcoin it is roughly honest. For nearly every other network it is far too cautious.

We timed 1.48 million paid orders across fourteen networks over the twelve months to the end of August, from the moment a shopper picks a network to the moment the order is paid.

Lightning lands at a median of 46 seconds. Bitcoin on its base layer takes 14 minutes 16. Same asset underneath, often the same shopper, and nearly nineteen times the wait.

The median also hides the part that fills your inbox. More than a quarter of Bitcoin payments took longer than 20 minutes, against 0.0% on Lightning. Solana is the interesting one. Its median is about a minute, and yet 3.2% of Solana payments ran past 20 minutes, a higher share than Ethereum, Tron or Polygon. Fast most of the time, very slow some of the time, and invisible if you only look at the median.

Two things worth doing with this.

Write your support replies per network. A Bitcoin payment still pending at fifteen minutes is completely normal. A Solana payment pending at fifteen minutes deserves a look.

And make the faster options easy to find. The shopper picks the network and pays its fee, but what they see first is partly up to you. The same USDC arrives roughly two and a half times faster on Solana than on Ethereum, with no difference in what lands in your balance.

One thing that turned out not to matter is the selection screen. Shoppers took between 29 and 61 seconds to choose a coin and network, on every network we measured. Whatever is slowing your crypto payments down, it happens after that.

The full tables, the method and its limits are in the first comment.

06/10/2026

Somewhere in your standard client contract there is a clause about who pays for travel. There is almost certainly nothing about who pays the network fee.

That gap stays invisible until an international client pays you in crypto. A client who sends the invoice amount minus their own transfer fee has underpaid you, and the invoice stays open until somebody sends the difference.

We walked one international invoice through from quote to bank statement, and the parts that mattered turned out to be in the contract rather than the technology. Four sentences do most of the work.

Price it in euros and say so. Crypto is how the client pays, while the euro stays the unit of account. Leave that out and sooner or later you will argue about which day's rate applied.

Name the assets and networks you accept. "Cryptocurrency" is not specific enough. The right coin on the wrong network is a tedious afternoon for both of you.

Say who bears the network fee. There is a tolerance setting for short payments, up to 10%, but it is there to absorb rounding. The sentence in the contract handles everything else.

Define when payment counts as made. When the payment is confirmed and credited, not when the client presses send.

Then there is the one that catches agencies on retainers. Recurring invoices go out weekly or monthly on schedule, and they keep going out whether or not the last one was paid. Stopping the series stops future invoices and leaves the ones already sent live. So a client who quietly stops paying in month one collects invoices in months two and three, while your dashboard looks busy and your bank does not. Put a person on the retainer list once a month, because the schedule will not do it for you.

The rest is simpler than people expect. Your client needs a wallet, not an account with us, and you can settle in euros so the crypto never sits on your books.

The full walkthrough, including what your accountant will ask for, is in the first comment.

05/10/2026

A failed top-up does not make a sound.

The card gets declined, nobody happens to be looking, and the first anyone hears about it is a service that stops halfway through somebody's shift. On a communications platform, that is a dialer going quiet in the middle of a campaign.

A top-up behaves nothing like a purchase. Same customer, similar amount, many times a month, and never the point of anyone's day. Cards struggle with it for reasons that have nothing to do with whether the customer has the money. Small, frequent, cross-border charges look a lot like card testing from an issuer's side, and issuers lean towards declining.

Crypto does not help a customer who has no money. It helps the one who has money and cannot get it to you, and in prepaid that is most of the problem.

However, the usual way of adding it creates a new problem. Most setups copy the card flow. Click top up, get an invoice, send to a fresh address. That address is single use. Busy customers save it the first time, send to it again the following week, and your support inbox fills with the same message... I paid, my balance did not move, can I just have one address?

Yes, they can. A payment channel gives each customer one deposit address that stays theirs. They save it once, send whenever the balance runs low, and every deposit comes back matched to that customer so your system can credit it on arrival.

Now the limitation, because in prepaid it matters more than anywhere.

Nothing in crypto can reach into a wallet and auto-reload a balance. There is no card on file and nothing to pull from. So the piece you build yourself is an alert that lands before zero, and one detail from the article is worth stealing outright. Set the threshold in time, not money. "Your balance is below 15 EUR" gets ignored mid-shift. "About two hours of calling left" gets a top-up.

The full piece, including where this does not fit, is in the first comment.

01/10/2026

The most common thing that goes wrong with a crypto payment is that the customer pays too much.

Usually by a few cents.

Every finance team that evaluates crypto payments asks the same second question. The first one is how it works. The second one is what happens when it does not. Almost nobody answers that with numbers, so we went through 1.6 million paid orders from the twelve months to the end of August.

82.5% arrived for exactly the invoiced amount. Roughly one in nine arrived with too much, and 86.3% of those overpayments were under one euro. More than half were under ten cents. That looks far more like wallets rounding up than anyone fat-fingering an extra zero.

Short payments are rarer, and nine in ten of them still settled. The ones that actually failed, where money landed but not enough of it, came to a number equal to 0.69% of paid orders.

Two details decide what happens next.

There is a tolerance setting for short payments, anywhere from 0% to 10%, and it only rescues a payment that arrives inside the 20 minute window. It is also smaller than people hope. 70.9% of the short payments that failed were more than 10% short, further than any tolerance can reach. It is built for near misses, and near misses are not what usually fails.

Small overpayments mostly stay put. A refund only goes out above 2 EUR, which leaves 91% of overpayments below the line. Nine cents was never coming back.

Then there is the figure people compare to the wrong thing. Merchants refunded 0.30% of paid orders. Nothing on this rail can pull money back out of your account, so every one of those was a merchant choosing to make something right. Reading it as a chargeback rate gets it backwards.

The risk most finance teams brace for and the risk that shows up in the order book are two different things.

The full breakdown, with every table behind these numbers, is in the first comment.

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