Written by Chris Matthews, SVP of Product and Engineering

With deep experience in fintech product development, Chris leads engineering and product strategy at Shift Markets, where he helps exchanges, brokers, and fintechs launch and scale high-performance trading and payments infrastructure. His work powers the platforms behind dozens of exchanges and enterprise-grade crypto payment systems worldwide.

What Successful Market Leaders Do Differently With Payments

I’ve spent years watching platforms try to grow while relying on someone else’s payment rails. On paper, it feels faster. In reality, it’s like building your business on rented land. You don’t control the experience, the margins, or even the relationship with your own merchants.

The market leaders I’ve seen up close all share one trait: they own the payment layer. Crypto payments are a revenue engine. Over the last two years, we’ve witnessed demand for crypto payments skyrocket across e-commerce, SaaS, fintech, and digital marketplaces. But here’s the catch: most platforms still rely on third-party solutions that give them zero control over the experience, the margins, or the merchant relationship.

That’s a problem. Because if you’re trying to scale your platform, own your market, or grow your exchange, relying on someone else’s rails won’t get you there. The operators that win in 2025 will be the ones who own the payment layer outright.

You Can’t Control What You Don’t Own

When you integrate someone else’s payment solution, you’re renting infrastructure. You hand off the user experience. You accept someone else’s fee structure. You have no visibility into liquidity or settlement. Most importantly, you’re giving up control of one of the most powerful parts of your business: payments.

Since leading product development at Shift Markets, I’ve seen firsthand how much leverage a platform gains by owning this layer. With a white-label crypto payment gateway built on infrastructure like ours, you flip the model. You control how merchants onboard, what fees they pay, how conversions work, and where liquidity comes from. You decide whether you want to settle in stablecoins, fiat, or crypto. You create a branded experience that strengthens your platform instead of sending users elsewhere.

If You’re Not Earning on Payments, Someone Else Is

Most exchanges and platforms don’t realize just how much value flows through a crypto payment until they see the numbers. Each invoice paid in BTC, ETH, or USDC triggers multiple steps: pricing, conversion, settlement. Each of those steps can be monetized when you control the backend.

Our CryptoPay system lets you mark up exchange rates from your liquidity providers, charge transaction fees per merchant group, and even define guaranteed quotes (RFQs) for price certainty. You manage those pricing levers directly from the back office. The result is that you turn payments into a recurring revenue stream, not just a technical requirement.

Growth Falls Apart Without the Right Foundations

We designed our crypto payment gateway to handle real-world complexity because that’s what enterprises and exchanges need. The platform supports thousands of merchants, grouped into configurable tiers with specific KYC rules, transaction limits, and fee structures. You can view balances, monitor activity, and make changes instantly through a secure admin dashboard.

Under the hood, the engine is powered by the same battle-tested technology that runs our exchange stack: a high-performance matching engine, a market maker for aggregated liquidity, and the ability to create synthetic pairs. This is the infrastructure that lets you run a full crypto payment operation with institutional-grade precision.

Traders Remember the Experience More Than the Tech

What your trader see is a sleek, branded dashboard where they can generate invoices, track payments in real time, and get paid in the currency of their choice. They can integrate via API, use an embeddable widget, or generate invoices manually. And if a customer underpays or overpays, the system handles it intelligently. It tracks partial payments, sends real-time webhooks, and keeps both parties informed.

It’s everything you’d expect from a modern fintech stack, but fully crypto-native and fully under your brand.

Payments Are Too Strategic to Outsource

Crypto payments are quickly becoming foundational infrastructure, but not everyone needs to build the foundation themselves.

If you’re an exchange, FX broker, fintech platform, PSP, or bank, you’re already doing the hard work: custody, liquidity, compliance, treasury. For businesses like yours, owning the crypto payment layer is essential. You gain control over margins, branding, onboarding, and settlement, and you turn what was once a cost center into a revenue engine.

For platforms that aren’t in that world, like online retailers or SaaS platforms with no financial backend, it makes more sense to plug in a hosted product like Nexus Pay. But for operators already managing financial rails, owning your payment stack gives you a strategic edge. CryptoPay gives you the infrastructure to do just that, under your brand, on your terms, and with full monetization built in.

If you’re ready to stop renting and start owning the payment layer, connect with our team.