Learn · 13 Jul 2026

Why accept stablecoin payments?

Every card payment you accept costs you money. Not a lot on any single sale — 1.5% to 3.5%, depending on the card and your provider — but it never stops. In 2025, US merchants collectively paid $198 billion in card processing fees. That’s not a rounding error. That’s the cost of being able to take payment at all.

Stablecoins offer a different arrangement. Here’s what actually changes.

The fee stops being a percentage

A card fee scales with the sale. A €5 coffee costs you roughly 10 cents to process. A €500 order costs you €10. The bigger the sale, the more it takes.

A stablecoin payment on the XRP Ledger costs a fraction of a cent — flat, regardless of amount. Whether the customer pays €5 or €5,000, the network fee is the same tiny number. The percentage disappears.

The money arrives now, not in three days

Card settlement takes days. The customer taps, you see “approved,” but the money lands in your account later — sometimes much later, depending on your provider and whether it’s a weekend.

A stablecoin payment settles on the ledger in three to five seconds. Not “approved” — actually settled, actually yours, final and irreversible. There’s no clearing period because there’s nothing to clear. The transfer happened.

Nobody sits between you and your money

Card payments route through a processor, an acquiring bank, a card network, and an issuing bank. Each takes a cut. Each can hold, freeze, or reverse. Chargebacks can arrive months after a sale.

A direct stablecoin payment has no intermediary. The customer’s wallet sends to your wallet. It’s done. No chargebacks, no holds, no account reviews.

But isn’t crypto too volatile for a shop?

This is the whole point of a stablecoin. RLUSD is pegged one-to-one to the US dollar, backed by cash and short-term treasuries. €10 of RLUSD today is €10 of RLUSD next month. You’re not accepting a speculative asset — you’re accepting a dollar that happens to move on a public ledger.

The volatility argument applies to Bitcoin or XRP. It doesn’t apply to a stablecoin.

This isn’t hypothetical anywhere but here

In Southeast Asia, 43% of cross-border B2B payments already use stablecoins. Filipino workers abroad send money home for under 0.1% in fees — banks charge an average of 8.3% for the same transfer. Asia processed $12.5 trillion in stablecoin transaction volume in 2025, up 67% year over year.

The technology isn’t waiting to be proven. It’s being used at scale, by people who found it cheaper and faster than the alternative.

What it costs you to try

The honest answer: a customer needs a wallet holding RLUSD, and you need one too. That’s a real barrier today — most people don’t have one yet. Stablecoin payments won’t replace cards in your shop this year.

But the cost of accepting them is close to zero. There’s no terminal to rent, no monthly minimum, no percentage skimmed off every sale. If one customer in a hundred pays this way, you keep the whole amount.

That’s the trade: a smaller pool of customers who can pay, but no fee on any of them.