MoonPay has signed on to the stablecoin payment rail that WalletConnect and French terminal maker Ingenico began building earlier this year, giving the in-store crypto checkout experiment a branded fiat settlement layer for the first time.
MoonPay has signed on to the stablecoin payment rail that WalletConnect and French terminal maker Ingenico began building at the start of this year, giving the in-store crypto checkout experiment a branded fiat settlement layer for the first time. The partnership, disclosed earlier this week, brings together three firms that each control a chunk of the payment pipeline.
Ingenico's Android-based terminals sit in roughly 170 countries and handle billions of transactions a year. WalletConnect's Pay product routes signed transactions from any of seven hundred-plus compatible wallets. MoonPay runs virtual account infrastructure that converts received stablecoins into local fiat at the merchant's bank. The combination gives a shopkeeper a practical way to take USDC, USDT or DAI at the till without rebuilding a back office, while the customer pays from the crypto wallet they already have on their phone.
That picture, at least in the version the three firms are selling, is the point. Stablecoin payments at physical checkout have been tried before — by Spedn, by Flexa, by dozens of smaller pilots — and none of them have survived contact with the reality of merchant acquisition and consumer habits. What is different this time is the distribution and settlement story. Ingenico already has its terminals deployed, and merchants do not need to install new hardware. WalletConnect provides the protocol layer without requiring any wallet to integrate directly. MoonPay's virtual accounts give each merchant a single IBAN or ACH destination in local currency, regardless of which stablecoin the customer presented.
The flow at the point of sale is deliberately boring. A customer picks the stablecoin option on the terminal; the terminal generates a QR code carrying the transaction payload; the customer scans it with whichever wallet they use, signs, and pays. WalletConnect handles the secure handshake, MoonPay performs the conversion, and the merchant's account is credited. The whole sequence is advertised at roughly three to seven seconds, comparable to a contactless card authorisation, and the merchant's total acceptance cost, according to the partners, sits between 0.1% and 1%. A typical card interchange runs 1.5% to 3.5% in most European markets.
If those numbers hold in practice, the cost saving is the most concrete argument stablecoin payments have produced at the physical till. Card interchange and scheme fees are one of the most durable rents in modern finance. Visa and Mastercard earn tens of billions a year between them from the gap between what merchants pay and what payment networks cost to operate. A system that undercuts that rent by an order of magnitude is an obvious target for merchants in thin-margin categories — hospitality, grocery, fuel — that have spent the last decade watching their acceptance fees climb.
The harder question is the demand side. Stablecoin transaction volume now routinely exceeds ACH in the United States, and total stablecoin supply recently crossed $317 billion. But almost all of that volume is institutional, cross-border, or DeFi-native. Consumer checkout is a different problem. The average shopper in Paris, Milan or London does not hold USDC in a wallet that can sign a WalletConnect session, and the fiat on-ramp to get them there is not frictionless. The three firms are pitching the initial rollout at merchants with a meaningful share of crypto-native customers, travel, digital goods and certain luxury categories, which is an honest read of where the addressable users actually live.
MoonPay brings a second thing to the partnership that matters more than the tech stack. It has spent the last three years building fiat on-ramps that can survive merchant banking compliance. Crypto card spending tripled to $600 million a month through the end of Q1 2026, an expansion built on the Visa and Mastercard rails MoonPay and its competitors have quietly threaded through dozens of national banking systems. A direct stablecoin rail that settles into those same bank accounts, without the card interchange sitting in the middle, is the logical next step — and one that Polygon Labs is also chasing with its own payments unit.
None of this makes crypto payments into a mass-market phenomenon. The long history of stablecoin payment pilots is littered with announcements that sounded similar and then died quietly. What makes this one different is the absence of any obvious single point of failure in the architecture — no custom terminal, no custom wallet, no single issuer on the settlement side. Each component is used for what it was already doing. The three firms are shipping into existing hardware, existing wallets and existing merchant bank accounts.
Whether shoppers actually use it is the question the pilot is built to answer. Ingenico is preparing terminal firmware rollouts through Q2, and MoonPay is onboarding the first merchant cohort now.
