Why Native Crypto Deposits Are Critical for Retail Brokers

The Silent Leak in Your Acquisition Funnel

User growth and volume keep every brokerage alive—but the very first interaction in that funnel is often surrendered to rivals. In some of the largest and most strategic markets, stablecoins now represent over 60% of deposit volumes for retail FX and CFD brokers. For these brokers, who do not offer blockchain capabilities, traders cannot buy, sell, or keep their stablecoins with the broker. Instead they start to rely on a crypto exchange for their primary way to manage their trading capital. Just to make a deposit or withdrawal, clients must detour through companies like Binance, Coinbase, or OKX, who now offer competing products. Even worse, when brokerages don’t offer crypto native trading, exchanges now offer a more compelling product to the trader.

This weakness in the acquisition funnel is enormous. Most brokers still cannot handle crypto natively, resulting in a systematic outsourcing of onboarding to direct competitors. They invest millions in marketing to acquire users, only to send them to rival platforms for their first financial interaction. When users develop muscle memory navigating the crypto exchange interface and building trust for a crypto native environment, brokers train their traders to prefer platforms that actively compete for long-term business.

What Our Analysis Reveals: The True Value of Crypto Users

To understand the real stakes of crypto deposit outsourcing, we conducted an independent analysis of prominent users actively utilizing crypto payment integrations from the beginning of 2025 through mid-July. What we discovered should alarm every brokerage executive: the users you’re redirecting to competitor platforms are irreplaceable.

Our examination of nearly 20,000 crypto deposit transactions across 16,369 unique wallet addresses representing over $101 million in volume reveals a stark reality. Crypto users don’t fit the casual experimenter profile: they’re typically high-value power users averaging $5,055 USD per transaction, with individual deposits reaching as high as $518,980. Most significantly, 80.1% of total volume comes from transactions over $10,000, showcasing the caliber of capital these users deploy to the trading platforms of their choice.

The implications for competitive positioning are severe. Every crypto user redirected to Binance or Coinbase represents a customer who transacts at premium levels being delivered directly to a competitor’s acquisition funnel. These platforms recognize the lifetime value of such users and deploy sophisticated retention strategies to capture them permanently.

The strategic imperative couldn’t be clearer: each day you redirect these power users elsewhere, you’re systematically transferring customers who operate at institutional transaction levels to competitor platforms that will aggressively work to retain them.

Traders Want Crypto Speed Processing

Remember when funding an account took three business days? Those days are gone. Today’s clients—retail and institutional—expect:

• Real-time balances
• Instant confirmations
• Friction-free transitions from intent to execution

Crypto rails deliver this experience natively; legacy fiat rails do not. Forcing users through a buy-transfer-wait-convert-wire routine hands mindshare (and wallet share) to someone else.

This expectation shift isn’t reversible. Users who experience instant crypto deposits won’t accept multi-day SWIFT wire settlements as reasonable. The convenience gap between crypto and traditional funding methods has become so wide that offering only fiat deposits feels like providing dial-up internet in a broadband world. Once customers become comfortable with external exchanges during this friction, convincing them to return becomes nearly impossible.

Don’t Forget About the Blockchain Data

When you outsource the deposit step, you don’t just give away the client experience – you surrender the signal that powers modern brokerage intelligence.

Every on‑chain deposit and withdrawal address is a rich telemetry stream. With direct control you can:

• Map funding provenance – See whether capital originates from hot wallets, mixers, lending protocols, or cold‑storage treasuries—vital context for compliance and risk‑tiering.
• Segment client behavior – Identify arbitrageurs, long‑term accumulators, and high‑frequency traders based on address clusters and settlement cadence.
• Price services dynamically – Use wallet history to tailor margin terms, fee tiers, or cross‑sell offers instead of blunt, one‑size‑fits‑all pricing.
• Detect churn in advance – Outflow patterns often flag disengagement days before P&L drops surface in your trading logs

Handing deposits to a giant exchange places you one full hop away from that intelligence. Worse, you donate those same behavioral datasets to a competitor that already owns the customer’s day‑one relationship. They get the addresses, the flows, and the metadata—fuel for their own market‑making desks and cross‑product up‑sell models.

In 2025, data moats decide winners. Relinquishing wallet‑level insight is the strategic equivalent of letting a rival install analytics tags across your entire onboarding stack. Stop paying to lose twice – first the relationship, then the data that could have sharpened every decision your brokerage makes.

Solve the Crypto Deposit Bottleneck

Modern crypto payment gateways now provide:

• Embedded onboarding—clients never leave your UI
• Automated KYC / wallet management
• Real-time reconciliation into OMS/EMS
• Seamless crypto–fiat conversion where required

The sophistication of current crypto payment infrastructure addresses every historical concern about integration complexity. Today’s solutions offer white-label experiences that maintain your brand throughout the entire deposit flow. Behind the scenes, enterprise-grade infrastructure handles automated wallet generation, private key security, blockchain monitoring, and compliance reporting. What once required months of custom development can now be deployed in weeks through API-first architectures designed specifically for regulated financial services.

To learn more about integrating CryptoPay into your brokerage, visit Shift Markets’ CryptoPay page.

About Ian McAfee & Shift Markets

Ian McAfee is the co-founder and CEO of Shift Markets, with over 18 years of experience in the foreign exchange and cryptocurrency sectors. Founded in 2009, Shift Markets started in FX trading infrastructure but has since embraced blockchain and cryptocurrency, aiming to make these technologies accessible to a broad range of businesses.

Under Ian’s guidance, Shift Markets provides powerful, easy-to-integrate crypto-as-a-service technology, enabling businesses to swiftly commercialize digital assets. The company helps enterprises integrate digital asset trading at its highest level, ensuring efficient adoption and superior market performance.