TL;DR

• Web3 initiatives in Fortune 500 companies are up 39-56% YoY, likely in an attempt to access wealthy crypto customers (in the near term) and save on transaction fees (in the long term).

Full Story

We read Coinbase’s "State of Crypto: The Fortune 500 Moving Onchain” report, so you don’t have to!

The headline stats:

• Reported web3 initiatives by Fortune 100 companies has increased 39% year-over-year (hitting a record high in Q1 2024)

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

• Onchain stablecoin settlement volumes reached all-time-highs in Q1 ‘24 (w annual settlement volumes hitting $10T in 2023)

“Ok, but why is this happening?”

In the near term:

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

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

We’ve seen this work wonders in web2:

1. Amazon’s one-click checkout

2. Afterpay’s buy-now-pay-later

3. And Visa/Mastercard’s tap-to-pay

All of these technologies made massive improvements to customer conversion rates, simply by making the checkout process smoother.

In the long term:

Crypto payments are CHEAP!

Brick-and-mortar retailers tend to have average profit margins between 0.5 and 4.5% - that's razor thin.

Visa, Mastercard and American Express charge merchants anywhere between 1.29% - 3.29% (+.05c - .10c) in transaction fees.

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

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

The result: a potential savings of billions per year on transaction fees.

Alright, now you know!