Loop Crypto vs. Stripe Crypto
Introduction
Companies worldwide need the ability to accept cryptocurrency and stablecoin payments from customers for a wide range of tokens, blockchains, and wallets. Choosing the right payment processor, whether Loop, Stripe, or another provider, is crucial for your business success.
Crypto and stablecoin payment processors plug into billing engines just like traditional payment processors to orchestrate payments. Conversely, billing engines like Stripe Billing or Chargebee store billing logic and generate invoices.
Because of this tight link between payment processors and billing engines, payment processors must align with your existing business models. Processors that restrict your billing methods (such as subscription options), limit your customer base, or constrain your settlement options can significantly impact your operations. The right payment processor offers true flexibility and seamless integration with your existing technology stack.
Stripe natively offers crypto and stablecoin payment processing, however with some limitations such as being available for only certain geographies, no native autopay for recurring payments, and limitations on tokens and networks that are acceptable.
This is where Loop Crypto can come in. For businesses using or considering Stripe Billing, Loop can be seamlessly integrated as an additional payment method within the Stripe Billing platform. This approach allows you to maintain all the benefits of Stripe's proven billing infrastructure while gaining access to Loop's advanced cryptocurrency payment features—without being limited to Stripe's own crypto payment processing capabilities.
Below, we explore how to compare Loop's cryptocurrency payment processing capabilities with Stripe's crypto payment processing, demonstrating how Loop's integration with Stripe Billing can provide superior crypto functionality while maintaining Stripe's billing features.
About Stripe
Stripe began by offering a simple payment gateway, and over time, has built an ecosystem meant to enable and plug into the range of financial tools companies use to operate. During Stripe Sessions 2025, the Stripe team conveyed their core belief that Stripe is designed as a platform to be built upon.
While Stripe itself offers a broad range of offerings, they tend to focus less on specializing in one particular capability. This is where a solution like Loop Crypto comes in. As we will detail, Stripe does offer crypto functionality, but the platform is really most powerful when it is utilized in concert with a specialized crypto and stablecoin payment gateway like Loop. At Loop, we are deeply focused on the crypto and stablecoin payment experience and make it simple for this experience to be plugged into existing billing platforms, like Stripe.
Supercharging Stripe with Loop’s payment gateway
At its core, Loop is a payment acceptance solution that enables merchants to get paid in crypto (including stablecoins) and then settle funds in either crypto or fiat. With hundreds of millions of crypto and stablecoin users globally and $250B+ in stablecoins already circulating, merchants cannot afford to ignore this payment method. It is a critical means to get paid by more customers, get paid faster, and get paid with reduced fees.
Over the last year, Stripe has focused more attention on the stablecoin space. One of their key offerings is a fiat-to-crypto onramp that is used by applications throughout the web3 ecosystem to allow their users to purchase crypto with a card or bank transfer. More recently, they announced plans to enable stablecoin financial accounts for their merchants globally, and they will be issuing their own stablecoin known as USDB, following their acquisition of Bridge in late 2024.o
The merchant acceptance side has been less of a focus for Stripe to date, but they have moved forward with a limited release of a checkout solution for select merchants in the United States to accept stablecoins. This solution allows a merchant to accept a one-time payment in a stablecoin on Ethereum, Polygon, Base, and Solana. The merchant acceptance offering does not support recurring payments for subscriptions, though.
This is where a specialized crypto and stablecoin payment gateway like Loop Crypto comes in. While you can continue to use Stripe for your core billing logic and invoice generation, Loop supplements the Stripe platform by providing a more robust crypto payment solution that plugs into Stripe.
You can read more about billing management systems here, but in essence, these systems provide the core billing logic that determines when customers should be invoiced and for how much. This is where Stripe excels. It supports a broad range of pricing logic for subscriptions from basic flat-rate subscriptions to a variety of usage-based models (per seat, quantities, tiers, etc.).
Loop’s expertise is on the merchant acceptance side and managing the complexities of on-chain payments. This entails tasks such as managing wallet connections, interacting with node providers to ensure transactions make it on-chain, supporting thousands of tokens and chains, and emitting notifications related to payment statuses. When utilizing Loop’s Stripe integration, merchants continue to use Stripe’s billing management system and fiat processing alongside Loop’s crypto acceptance capabilities.
Loop’s unique capabilities
To go a level deeper, we wanted to outline some of the specific areas where Loop provides a unique payment experience and can enhance merchants’ existing implementations with Stripe. The best part is that setting up the integration can take less than 15 minutes, and you can get started with our self-serve onboarding flow.
1. Global support
Stripe’s crypto offering is limited to entities based in the United States. This prevents businesses from other parts of the world from accessing crypto payments. Loop Crypto, on the other hand, is able to support merchants based in hundreds of jurisdictions while still ensuring compliance with US-based OFAC designations. This allows merchants around the globe to benefit from crypto payments.
2. Autopay for recurring crypto payments
Stripe currently only supports one-time purchases. For subscriptions, they use this one-time purchase capability to send a series of emails asking customers to pay each month. Needless to say, this lack of true autopay leads to high friction and customer dropoff.
Conversely, Loop Crypto enables automated recurring payments on-chain with true autopay. A customer can authorize a wallet and save a payment method on file, which then allows payment to be automatically pulled at any cadence (e.g., monthly for a subscription).
This autopay functionality is critical for subscription businesses. It reduces churn and ensures on-time payments from customers. With Loop, customers sign up once, authorize a wallet to be debited on an ongoing basis, and then that’s it. Next month, the payment is automatically pulled from the wallet. This saves days of work and puts more revenue back into merchants’ pockets by lowering churn rates.
The best part is that merchants get the benefit of Stripe’s billing system to create invoices and manage subscriptions, while using Loop’s payment engine to unlock crypto subscriptions.
Loop supplements the Stripe dashboard with detailed data about merchants’ on-chain payments, giving them all the tools they need to get paid each time and on time.
3. Token and network support
Stripe currently only offers a very limited number of tokens for customers to pay with. Their offering consists of only USDC on Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, and Base as well as Paxos stablecoins, USDG and USDP.
Stripe does not support tokens like USDT, the most widely held and used stablecoin - 70% of stablecoin supply is USDT, and about 65% of all stablecoin transactions are in USDT. Tether’s USDT has over 330 million users while Circle’s USDC is estimated to only have 27 million users. With Loop, these hundreds of millions of additional users of USDT are unlocked for merchants.
Loop Crypto is able to support a broad range of tokens and stablecoins across all Ethereum (EVM) based chains and Solana. Beyond network support, Loop Crypto can enable payment in any ERC-20 and SPL token. While Loop also supports USDC, it is not constrained to just one or two stablecoins. Loop enables payments in other popular stablecoins like USDT and PayPal’s PYUSD as well as thousands of other tokens.
Loop’s vast support for networks and tokens ensures merchants can offer their customers the broadest possible set of payment methods. For digital checkout experiences, this is key as studies find that 13% of online shoppers abandon their cart if their desired payment choice is not available.
4. Settlement in fiat or crypto
Stripe’s crypto offering is limited to settlement in USD to a US bank account. This means global merchants cannot settle into bank accounts outside the US or into other currencies. Additionally, merchants who increasingly desire to manage their treasuries in stablecoins lose the optionality of being able to settle in fiat or crypto. This optionality is something we provide at Loop. For teams that are consistently transacting on chain, this optionality is critical for their business and reduces the hassle of having to move funds on and off chain.
5. Wallet support
By using Loop, merchants are also able to support the broadest possible set of wallet options. Loop allows customers to connect approximately 500 different wallets to the checkout experience to initiate payment. We also offer the ability to pay by exchange, unlocking the ability of a customer to send funds from a custodial account at an exchange like Binance or Coinbase. This type of broad wallet support is not available with Stripe. Their options are limited to Metamask, Phantom, Coinbase wallet, and WalletConnect.
The integration in action
As you evaluate stablecoin and crypto payment solutions, take a look at our case studies of merchants that are using Loop’s integration with Stripe. Leading brands like Helius, Antimetal, Privy, and Kaito are all powering their checkout experiences with the Loop+Stripe integration. It has allowed these companies to grow their customer bases while utilizing Loop’s capability to allow customers to have a wallet on file for future charges.
If you’re interested in learning more about Loop and our integration with Stripe, try it out for yourself. You can create an account in our Sandbox and connect Loop to Stripe test mode to see the experience. To get started, head here. If you want to learn more about how Loop integrates with other popular subscription management platforms, like OpenPay, you can schedule a call or check out our latest case study.
FAQ
How do I accept crypto payments for my business?
A crypto payment processor facilitates digital transactions between merchants and their customers enabling merchants to accept various forms of crypto payment. Merchants that accept crypto payments, especially recurring crypto payments, need to work through various complexities related to accepting payment on multiple networks, in multiple tokens, and from various types of wallets.
A payment processor, like Loop Crypto, handles this complexity and provides a crypto payments API and tooling that are easy to use. This allows for the secure and quick transfer of funds from the customer’s wallet to the merchant’s wallet. You can check out this article about payment processing in web3.
What is a crypto payment processor?
A crypto payment processor facilitates digital transactions between merchants and their customers enabling merchants to accept various forms of crypto payment. With Loop, we make it easy to accept stablecoins, ERC-20 tokens (tokens deployed within the Ethereum ecosystem and popular layer 2 networks), or SPL tokens (tokens deployed within the Solana ecosystem).
Merchants that accept crypto payments need to work through various complexities related to accepting payment on multiple networks, in multiple tokens, and from various types of wallets. Loop handles this complexity and provides APIs and tooling that are easy to use. This allows for the secure and quick transfer of funds from the customer’s wallet to the merchant’s wallet.
Can I accept crypto payments for subscriptions?
Yes! Loop works with recurring subscription payments. We work similar to credit cards - a customer authorizes their wallet to be charged, and each billing period the wallet is charged without the end customer having to take action.
What products does Stripe crypto offer?
Stripe returned to the crypto space more recently starting with an on-ramp product that allows select companies in certain jurisdictions to enable the purchasing of crypto via credit card and bank transfer. With Stripe’s recent acquisition of Bridge, they are offering their merchants stablecoin accounts as well. Stripe has a merchant acceptance solution available to certain US businesses that allows for one-time sends of USDC and select Paxos stablecoins.
