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And with regulatory policy clarifying and traditional players launching their own digital asset products, incumbent crypto firms are increasingly betting that the next wave of crypto adoption may not come from day traders or DeFi evangelists, but from payroll departments, procurement teams, and accountants reconciling cross-border invoices.
“Businesses are looking for a better type of money,” Sid Coelho-Prabhu, senior director of product at Coinbase, who’s leading the charge on Coinbase Business, told PYMNTS.
Companies that “want to accept crypto” are drawn by two primary use cases, he added. “Investment and payments.”
That’s why, after years of serving individuals and institutional investor, Coinbase itself is turning its attention to the middle market, what it sees as a growing class of startups, small-and-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and online-first merchants that increasingly want to hold, send and receive digital assets.
“When a business wants to collect money for a sale today, they tend to use payment processors that charge typically 3%,” said Coelho-Prabhu, noting that digital assets like stablecoins can provide a lower cost and more efficient option. “They face chargebacks … and the odds are stacked against them.”
After all, the long-term aim of blockchain has always been to serve as a financial infrastructure, the invisible layer enabling commerce itself. But is the business world ready?
One of the crypto sector’s first bets across traditional commerce is that cross-border crypto payouts can solve one of the oldest business pain points: paying people overseas.
“More and more companies are hiring global talent. They’re hiring people on the internet… contractors in Argentina or Turkey,” said Coelho-Prabhu, highlighting that these contractors increasingly prefer to receive payments in crypto, which arrive faster and cost less than international bank wires. “They get the money faster, it settles faster, the fees are often lower.”
In that scenario, the contractor already knows what to do — download a wallet like Coinbase Wallet, MetaMask, or Phantom. The question comes from the paying side: How do we actually send it?
That’s where Coinbase Business itself is hoping to step in with its global payouts feature, allowing companies to send the USDC stablecoin to any on-chain address or directly to an email recipient.
“The two most important people in the equation are our customer and the person that’s getting paid — not the middlemen payment networks or anyone else,” said Coelho-Prabhu.
“We have coffee shops, we have restaurants, we have manufacturers,” he added. “They’re not very high on the technical sophistication stage, but they have this need because they do some kind of global business.”
The through line is utility. Many of these firms weren’t “looking for crypto specifically,” Coelho-Prabhu explained. “They were just looking for faster payments.”
Read more: Coinbase Launches Stablecoin Payments Platform for B2B
If payouts are Coinbase’s answer to sending money, payment links are its solution for receiving it. A merchant using Coinbase Business can generate a URL or QR code that allows customers to pay in crypto — typically in USDC — without dealing with card networks or chargeback disputes.
“We’ve almost given customers the experience they’re used to, but under the hood, the payment is much faster,” Coelho-Prabhu explained. “It used to be very clunky, but now it’s gotten quite a bit better.”
“The experience … doesn’t feel that different than using Apple Pay or Google Pay,” he added.
And while crypto’s long-standing Achilles’ heel in business adoption has been accounting. Coinbase also wants to make that problem invisible. To that end, the firm has partnered with CoinTracker and Crypto Tax Calculator to sync transaction data directly into QuickBooks, Xero, and soon, NetSuite.
The growing interest in stablecoins from businesses, particularly ecommerce firms, also intersects with a futuristic undercurrent in tech: autonomous AI agents capable of transacting on behalf of users or businesses. Many crypto insiders see a natural synergy between those systems and blockchain rails.
“We all use AI today, and at some point we want to be able to just put a buy [button]… where an AI can go and do commerce on-chain,” said Coelho-Prabhu.
Because crypto is “inherently programmable,” he emphasized, it’s the only realistic medium for such machine-driven transactions. “Instead of having this AI collect credit card details, it can just have an embedded crypto wallet and make the crypto payment.”
If Coelho-Prabhu is right, the corporate ledger of the future may look less like a spreadsheet of bank transactions and more like a series of blockchain entries denominated in digital dollars.
