Blockchain payments allow money to move instantly, transparently, and across borders by recording every transaction on a shared, verifiable ledger. Businesses are gravitating toward public blockchains and stablecoins to send funds globally in minutes, cut transfer costs, and automate reconciliation. Firms using stablecoins for cross-border B2B payments report up to 60% cost savings and settlement in minutes.

Below, we’ll explain how blockchain for payments changes the fundamentals of payment processing, which payment types benefit most, and how it improves settlement, reconciliation, and recordkeeping.

What’s in this article?

• How is blockchain technology changing the way payments work?
  
• Which types of payment benefit the most?
  
• How do blockchain networks make settlement and recordkeeping easier?
  
• What challenges arise when linking blockchain to existing systems?
  
• How can companies deploy and measure the impact of blockchain-based payments?
  
• How Stripe Payments can help
  

How is blockchain technology changing the way payments work?

Instead of using intermediaries to maintain the ledger, blockchain creates a single, shared record of transactions that anyone can verify. Value moves directly between participants, not through a chain of intermediaries.

Here’s how blockchain is changing the payments landscape:

• Speed and access: Payments on public blockchains settle within minutes, any time of day, anywhere in the world. There are no bank hours or cutoff times. This “always-on” infrastructure is already handling $30 billion of stablecoin transactions daily.

• Lower costs: In Q1 2024, the global average cost of sending remittances was 6.35%. On blockchain networks, the same payments can cost a fraction of a percent.

• Wider reach: Anyone with an internet connection can send or receive funds on a public blockchain without a bank account. It has the potential to open new global markets by reaching businesses and customers who’ve been historically excluded from traditional financial systems.

• Built-in trust and transparency: Each transaction is cryptographically signed and recorded in a tamper-evident ledger. Once confirmed, it can’t be altered, which eliminates the need to reconcile multiple internal ledgers and reduces the risk of fraud. The payment either exists or it doesn’t, visible to everyone with access to the network.

• Finality: When a blockchain transaction settles, there are no reversals, chargebacks, or multiday clearing windows. Money received onchain can be redeployed almost immediately.

Which types of payment benefit the most?

Blockchain demonstrates its value especially in global and high-volume business transactions.

Here are three types of payment where blockchain technology is proving useful:

• Cross-border payments: Blockchain allows funds to be transferred directly from sender to recipient with near-instant settlement and full visibility.

• B2B payments: Business transactions are often slowed by mismatched invoices and disconnected systems. With blockchain technology, smart contracts prompt settlement automatically when goods arrive or data matches, which reduces dispute rates and frees working capital that would otherwise sit idle in reserves.

• Retail payments: Customers and businesses get lower fees and faster settlement, especially in regions with limited card infrastructure. A stablecoin transaction can function like digital cash without the chargeback risk associated with cards.

How do blockchain networks make settlement and recordkeeping easier?

Blockchain simplifies the entire payment process by turning the payment itself into a permanent, shared record.

Here’s how:

• Single source of truth: Everyone involved views the same transaction record, which reduces disputes and accelerates settlement.

• Automated recordkeeping: Transactions are time-stamped, signed, and addressable, so finance systems can post entries automatically.

• Faster closing processes: Constant confirmations speed revenue recognition and cash positioning. The ledger provides the transaction log, so daily closes become easier.

• Programmable settlement: Smart contracts can route, split, or release funds based on verified conditions. They match invoice and delivery data, milestone completions, or multiparty approvals, so execution and approval are captured in one step.

• Immutable audit trail: Every state change is cryptographically chained to the prior one, so auditors can look at Merkle proofs, trace value flows, and confirm completeness without assembling disparate threads.

• Privacy-conscious compliance: Ledgers offer traceability, while privacy controls let you prove what regulators need to see and keep unrelated data private.

• Enterprise resource planning (ERP) integration: Standardized, structured data maps onto existing accounting systems, so multientity reconciliation is easier to predict and repeat.

What challenges arise when linking blockchain to existing systems?

Integrating blockchain payments into legacy accounting, banking, and compliance systems can be a complicated task.

Businesses face several challenges:

• Infrastructure compatibility: Legacy treasury and ERP systems aren’t built for tokens or wallet addresses. To connect them requires translating blockchain transactions into familiar accounting events. Middleware or payment partners often handle this automatically, routing payments made on a blockchain into standard dashboards and cash reports.

• Practical design and custody: With blockchain, holding assets means managing cryptographic keys, a responsibility often left to cybersecurity rather than traditional finance. Businesses rely on regulated custodians and multisignature setups to reduce risk.

• Compliance in a pseudonymous environment: Crypto transactions don’t map neatly onto identities, but anti-money laundering (AML), Know Your Customer (KYC), and sanction rules still apply. Blockchain analytics help trace risk and flag suspicious activity, while global standards such as the FATF Travel Rule require verified sender and receiver data.

• Currency risk and stablecoin confidence: Businesses want blockchain speed without the volatility of crypto. Stablecoins pegged to fiat and backed by transparent reserves can provide that balance. Finance teams, in return, gain the confidence to treat them like digital cash equivalents.

• Performance and interoperability: Each blockchain differs in cost, speed, and reliability. Layer-2 networks, for example, can handle high-volume, low-fee payments.

How can companies deploy and measure the impact of blockchain-based payments?

Introducing blockchain payments upgrades operations and finances. To get it right, companies should carefully measure deliberate rollout steps.

Here’s how to introduce and measure the impact of blockchain-based payments.

Define success upfront

Decide what “better” looks like. “Better” might mean faster settlement, lower costs, fewer errors, or improved liquidity. Use these factors as benchmarks.

Measure the impact

Document current costs, such as network fees, foreign exchange spreads, chargebacks, reconciliation labor, and settlement times. Compare blockchain transaction costs to current expenses and project return on investment (ROI) across expected volume. Track working capital gains: faster settlement should free up cash for redeployment. Model the value of that acceleration through short-term borrowing rates or weighted average cost of capital (WACC). Factor in efficiency gains. Reduced reconciliation, fewer disputes, and consolidated audits save time and money.

Test before you scale

Start with high-friction flows, such as cross-border payouts, supplier settlements, or partner remittances, to prove value, uncover system quirks, and refine processes.

Use experienced partners

To ensure transparency, use regulated providers for custody, compliance, and integration, rather than building all the tools in-house.

Embed security and compliance from the start

Treat KYC, AML, Travel Rule reporting, and key management as core features. Multisignature wallets and secure custody protect assets without slowing your operations.

Gradually integrate and continuously measure

Monitor speed, costs, error rates, and compliance metrics against your baseline. Improve and scale only once results are validated.

How Stripe Payments can help

Stripe Payments provides a unified, global payments solution that helps any business—from scaling startups to global enterprises—accept payments online, in person, and around the world.

Stripe Payments can help you:

• Optimize your checkout experience: Create a frictionless customer experience and save thousands of engineering hours with prebuilt payment UIs, access to 125+ payment methods, and Link, a wallet built by Stripe.

• Expand to new markets faster: Reach customers worldwide and reduce the complexity and cost of multicurrency management with cross-border payment options, available in 195 countries across 135+ currencies.

• Unify payments in person and online: Build a unified commerce experience across online and in-person channels to personalize interactions, reward loyalty, and grow revenue.

• Improve payments performance: Increase revenue with a range of customizable, easy-to-configure payment tools, including no-code fraud protection and advanced capabilities to improve authorization rates.

• Move faster with a flexible, reliable platform for growth: Build on a platform designed to scale with you, with 99.999% historical uptime and industry-leading reliability.

Learn more about how Stripe Payments can power your online and in-person payments, or get started today.