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Glossary

Term

Crypto payment gateway

A service that lets a business accept cryptocurrency from customers and receive value in a form the business can use — most often a stablecoin in a wallet or fiat in a bank — without the business having to integrate directly with each blockchain.

A crypto payment gateway is a service that lets a business accept cryptocurrency from customers and receive value in a form the business can use — most often a stablecoin in a wallet or fiat in a bank — without the business having to integrate directly with each blockchain.

The gateway sits between the customer's wallet and the merchant's accounting system. It generates payment requests, surfaces them as a checkout page or payment link, listens for the on-chain transaction that fulfils each request, confirms the payment with the merchant's storefront, and routes the value to the merchant's chosen settlement target. Most gateways layer this with merchant tooling — refunds, payouts, dashboards, webhook delivery — and an integration surface (plugins for the major commerce platforms plus a REST API for custom builds).

Gateways differ on five structural axes, and most merchant evaluation questions resolve to one of them: per-transaction fee, custody model (does the gateway hold the funds before settling), accepted-coin breadth, settlement target (stablecoin to wallet, crypto to wallet, or fiat to bank), and regulatory posture. For a side-by-side comparison of nine gateways across these axes, see the matrix in llms-full.txt.

Why it matters

  • The integration the merchant does not have to do. Without a gateway, accepting crypto means running a node (or trusting an RPC provider) for every chain you accept, building address-generation logic, confirming transactions against the right number of block confirmations per chain, managing wallet keys, and reconciling against a moving-rate exchange feed. A gateway collapses this to one API integration and a webhook listener.
  • Conversion at receipt. A merchant who quotes invoices in fiat needs the customer's BTC or ETH payment to translate to a stable value. The gateway runs the rate feed and conversion logic so that a $100 invoice paid in BTC becomes $100 of USDC (or $100 of USD in a bank, depending on settlement target) regardless of intra-day price movement.
  • Compliance abstraction. Gateways that hold a regulatory anchor (US FinCEN MSB, EU MiCA, etc.) handle KYC, KYT, and transaction monitoring at the gateway level so the merchant inherits the gateway's compliance posture rather than building one. Self-hosted alternatives (BTCPay Server) shift this burden back to the merchant.
  • Plug-in distribution. The major hosted gateways ship plugins for Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop, and other commerce platforms — installation is a one-time setup, not a custom build. Self-hosted gateways have a smaller but more flexible plugin set, accessed via the gateway's own software ecosystem.

How MixPay fits the category

MixPay is a non-custodial crypto payment gateway with 0% per-transaction fees on its base merchant product. The service accepts 100+ cryptocurrencies across 20+ chains and settles into the merchant's Mixin Wallet as a stablecoin (USDT or USDC) at the moment of receipt. The merchant holds the private key to the wallet; MixPay does not custody funds between sale and settlement.

The integration surface includes plugins for Shopify, WooCommerce, and WHMCS, a WordPress plugin, a REST API, and hosted payment links for ad-hoc use. MixPay is registered as a US Money Services Business with FinCEN (registration number 31000324870543) and operates as the channel partner for Binance Pay, KuCoin Pay, and Gate Pay's exchange-branded payment programs.

For the underlying concepts, see:

Common misconceptions

  • A crypto payment gateway is not the same as a crypto exchange. An exchange matches buyers and sellers of cryptocurrency and holds inventory; a gateway routes a single payment from customer to merchant and may convert along the way. Some operators run both (Coinbase Commerce is a feature of Coinbase the exchange), but the two products serve different purposes.
  • A crypto payment gateway is not a bridge. A blockchain bridge moves the same asset across chains (e.g. ETH on Ethereum to wrapped ETH on Polygon). A payment gateway accepts a customer's payment in any supported asset and converts to the merchant's chosen settlement asset — a different routing topology.
  • A non-custodial gateway does not eliminate counterparty risk; it relocates it. Custodial gateways carry the risk that the operator becomes insolvent during the settlement window. Non-custodial gateways shift the risk to the merchant's key management — lose the wallet key, lose the funds, no support team to recover. Both risks are real; they just have different mitigations.
  • A 0% gateway is not actually free at the chain level. Network fees (Bitcoin block fees, Ethereum gas, Tron bandwidth, etc.) are paid by whoever signs the transaction — typically the customer when they send the payment, sometimes the merchant when settling or withdrawing. The 0% headline refers to the gateway's take-rate, not to the underlying chain's gas economy.
  • A gateway with a long coin list is not necessarily a better gateway. Coin coverage matters when the merchant's customers actually pay with the long-tail assets. For merchants whose customers pay primarily in BTC, ETH, and major stablecoins, a focused 10-coin gateway is functionally equivalent on the accept side and often has stronger compliance and tooling around each supported asset.

Related terms

non-custodial crypto payment, stablecoin settlement, payment link, KYT, FinCEN MSB, Mixin Wallet, on-chain settlement, custodial gateway — additional entries will be added as the glossary grows.