56% of America’s largest companies are now building in Web3

TL; DR

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We read Coinbase’s “State of Crypto: The Fortune 500 Moving OnchainReport so you don’t have to!

The headline stats:

• Fortune 100 companies’ reported Web3 initiatives increased 39% year-over-year (reaching an all-time high in Q1 2024)

• 56% of the Fortune 500 say their companies are working on onchain projects (including consumer-facing payments applications)

• Onchain stablecoin settlement volumes hit record highs in Q1 2024 (with annual settlement volumes reaching $10 trillion by 2023)

“Okay, but why is this happening?”

Short-term:

There is a lot of new wealth in crypto, with very few ways for holders to spend it efficiently.

By adding easy-to-use crypto payment rails to their tech stack, businesses can convert more people into paying customers.

We have seen that this works wonders web2:

1. Amazon’s one-click payment method

2. Afterpay’s buy-now-pay-later

3. And tap-to-pay from Visa/Mastercard

All of these technologies delivered dramatic improvements in customer conversion rates simply by making the checkout process smoother.

In the long-term:

Crypto payments are CHEAP!

Brick-and-mortar retailers typically have average profit margins between 0.5 and 4.5% – that’s razor thin.

Visa, Mastercard and American Express charge merchants anywhere from 1.29% – 3.29% (+0.05c – 0.10c) in transaction fees.

A $100 purchase with the cheapest possible credit card option would cost merchants $1.34 in transaction fees.

Low-cost crypto networks like Solana charge a flat fee of ~$0.00025 per transaction, making crypto payments 5360x cheaper on a $100 purchase.

The result: a potential saving of billions per year on transaction costs.

Okay, now you know!