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While the market goes steady, the crypto ecosystem continues to grow as merchants innovate and adopt cryptocurrency payments in their quest to gain new customers. 

Data platform PYMNTS collaborated with Bitpay to survey merchants, in an attempt to understand the trends on what the participants expect from digital currencies and their effect on payments and businesses. 

In the report titled “Paying With Cryptocurrency,” the researchers found that among businesses with an annual income of $1 billion, 85% are adopting crypto payments to find and gain new customers. On the other hand, 82% of all the merchants who participated in the survey cited crypto’s elimination of middlemen as their reason for accepting it as a payment method.

Apart from these, the results also showed that 77% of the surveyed merchants are also drawn to accepting crypto because of lower transaction fees. According to the report, the fees for processing crypto transactions are around 1%. This is much lower than the usual fees from 1.5% to 3.5% charged by other payment options like credit cards.

While most of the report shows positive perspectives on crypto, some merchants report that technical barriers and challenges still get in their way of adopting crypto payments. Of the merchants that do not accept crypto yet, 68% said that this is because of the challenges that they face in the implementation of the technology at the checkout.

Related: Crypto more popular than mutual funds among millennials, survey shows

Despite the crypto winter, a report published by Cointelegraph Research in June showed that a wide range of companies coming from various industries has already integrated crypto payment options. From entertainment platforms like to travel booking platforms, the crypto ecosystem continues to expand as global adoption progresses.

In the same month, Ben Caselin, an executive at trading firm AAX, told Cointelegraph that despite the bearish market, Bitcoin (BTC) adoption and Metaverse development continues to advance. According to Caselin, this is a good opportunity for businesses who are looking to tap into the crypto ecosystem.