Removing payment friction in the crypto onboarding experience

Blockchain.com originated as a Bitcoin block explorer, a website where bitcoin users could see the details of public cryptocurrency transactions. The company later introduced a digital wallet and an exchange for users to buy, store, and trade their cryptocurrencies. It also runs one of the biggest Institutional Markets businesses, offering bespoke solutions to the largest trading, investment, and mining companies in the crypto space. As of January 2022, 37 million verified users have created more than 80 million crypto wallets and transacted more than $1 trillion across nearly every country on the planet.

With growth plans to push the number of Blockchain.com’s users into the hundreds of millions, the company has turned to Stripe to improve the process of exchanging fiat for crypto and radically simplify the onboarding experience for new crypto investors.

Many crypto platform checkouts are challenged by low payment acceptance rates, volatile reliability, and frustrating user experiences, all of which erode user trust and discourage new users from signing up. Blockchain.com was no exception. Through the partnership with Stripe, Blockchain.com is already increasing payment acceptance rates by 20%, accepting more payment methods, and better managing fraud.

“Trust is a big focus for us because it’s daunting for consumers to turn their crypto interest into actual transactions,” said Justin Dorfman, senior product marketing manager at Blockchain.com. “A frictionless user experience is critical to building trust, so we’ve focused on making the process of exchanging fiat for crypto as simple as possible, and Stripe is playing a huge role in helping us make that happen.”

Increasing crypto adoption with Stripe

With a single integration, Stripe Payments has enabled Blockchain.com to facilitate its fiat pay-ins, securely accepting payments from cards and soon, for the first time, Apple Pay and Google Pay. The new Blockchain.com checkout flow was built with Stripe Elements, Stripe’s suite of UI building blocks, to deliver a secure, branded payments experience in just four weeks and with minimal engineering resources. Blockchain.com is also using Stripe Radar to better distinguish fraudsters from legitimate customers using Stripe’s machine learning model, which optimises payment acceptance using data and signals from millions of businesses.

“While Stripe’s conversion rates are excellent, knowing that Stripe is an engineering-first company that’s constantly innovating is what got our team really excited,” said Jim Wang, payments product manager at Blockchain.com. “Stripe has a mature API with great documentation and a robust sandbox environment for testing. Plus, having Stripe’s world-class integration specialists helping us through the journey made for a very smooth delivery.”

A singular payments platform to power global crypto growth

The partnership is initially powering Blockchain.com’s growth across existing markets, such as the US and UK, but much of the opportunity for adding new users will come from entering new markets, like Latin America. This requires ensuring investors around the world can onboard to the wallet and exchange using their preferred local payment methods. Before the Stripe partnership, Blockchain.com would have to build new, resource-intensive integrations for each incremental payment method Blockchain.com wanted to add. Now, with Stripe, adding new payment methods can be as easy as a click of a button.

“We’re expecting Stripe to give us big improvements in local acquisitions, particularly in the US,” concluded Wang. “But Stripe has great payment method coverage, in the US and beyond, and that really sets Stripe apart from the others.”