Why Payments Are the Most Undervalued Layer in Web3

For most of Web3’s history, attention has been concentrated on highly visible layers: blockchains, tokens, DeFi protocols, NFTs, and, more recently, AI agents. Payments, by contrast, have often been treated as a solved problem or a secondary feature — something that “just works” once the rest of the stack is in place.

In reality, payments are one of the least understood and most undervalued layers in Web3. Not because they lack importance, but because when payments work well, they become invisible. Yet this invisibility hides a critical truth: no decentralized system can scale into real economic infrastructure without reliable, efficient, and user-friendly payment rails.

1. Payments Are Where Web3 Meets the Real Economy

Blockchains can process transactions, but payments are more than transactions.

Payments involve:

Most Web3 innovation focuses on on-chain logic. Payments, however, sit at the boundary between on-chain systems and off-chain reality: merchants, payrolls, subscriptions, cards, marketplaces, and everyday consumption.

This boundary is where adoption either accelerates or stalls.

2. Speculation Was Overvalued; Payments Were Ignored

From 2017 to 2022, Web3 growth was driven largely by speculation:

These activities generated volume, but they did not require robust payment infrastructure. Moving value between protocols is not the same as paying for goods, services, or labor.

As a result, payments were underinvested:

Only when speculative cycles cooled did the industry begin to refocus on sustainable usage — and payments returned to the center of attention.

3. Stablecoins Changed the Equation

The rise of stablecoins quietly transformed Web3 payments.

Stablecoins solved several structural problems at once:

Today, stablecoins represent the dominant form of on-chain value transfer. In many regions, they already function as:

This shift reframed payments from “crypto spending” to “on-chain money movement.” Once value stability was achieved, building proper payment infrastructure finally made economic sense.

4. Payments Are Infrastructure, Not a Feature

One reason payments remain undervalued is that they are often positioned as features:

In reality, payments are infrastructure.

When this layer is missing or poorly designed, every application built on top suffers. When it is done well, it enables entire ecosystems without drawing attention to itself.

5. UX Is the Real Bottleneck, Not Throughput

Web3 does not suffer from a lack of throughput. It suffers from a lack of payment usability.

Most users do not want to:

The most important innovation in Web3 payments is not higher TPS, but abstraction:

This is why payment-focused products increasingly resemble fintech on the surface while remaining on-chain underneath.

6. Regulation Pushes Payments Forward, Not Back

Contrary to popular belief, regulation has accelerated innovation in Web3 payments.

Frameworks like MiCA in the EU and emerging U.S. proposals have forced the industry to:

This pressure favors payment models that are:

In many cases, payments become the safest entry point for institutions into Web3, precisely because they are easier to reason about than speculative financial products.

7. From Theory to Infrastructure: What This Looks Like in Practice

CPAY shows how the payment layer described above works in practice when it is treated as infrastructure rather than a feature. 

By abstracting routing, liquidity management, asset conversion, and settlement logic at the backend level, CPAY allows businesses to offer stablecoin-based payments that feel like familiar fintech flows while remaining fully on-chain underneath. 

This approach reflects the broader shift in Web3 from speculative activity to repeatable economic usage, where payments become invisible to the user but essential to scale.

8. The Next Phase: Payments as a Coordination Layer

Looking ahead, payments will play a role far beyond simple value transfer.

They will become:

As Web3 moves from financial experimentation to economic infrastructure, payments shift from an afterthought to a foundation.