NOWPayments in 2022: A Year in Review

Accept crypto payments

Another year is coming to an end, so we at NOWPayments are excited to share everything we achieved with our community and our partners—because all this wouldn’t be possible without your support!

Shortcuts:

A word from NOWPayments’ CEO

Xena Kash, NOWPayments’ Chief Executive Officer, shared her impressions from 2022:

“This year was exciting—yet turbulent—which only proved how much we believe in crypto and are willing to help it achieve new heights with a myriad of use cases. We managed to roll out lots of new features and updates, and we promise—next year with NOWPayments will be even better!
Year by year, despite any challenges, crypto winter included, we prove that the world is ready for this inevitable change and ready to embrace crypto; the attention, curiosity, and enthusiasm about our services is evergrowing!
In 2023 we will do everything in our power to cover the needs of more and more diverse businesses. Crypto IS already here and we are proud to be a part of its adoption.”
— Xena Kash, NOWPayments’ CEO

Here Is NOWPayments’ 2022 in Numbers

Over 60 new assets
25000 new partners
19 New Features & Updates

Let’s dive in!

What are the newly accepted cryptocurrencies?

Let’s talk about cryptocurrencies more. We’ve added 67 assets during 2022 and now the number of accepted coins and tokens exceeded 160 (!), making NOWPayments the leader among crypto payment gateways in terms of accepted cryptos!

Just take a look at this huge list:
KLAY, RACA, POODL, XDC, BRISE, BLOCKS, NFTB, AVN, MARSH, ILV, SFUND, GALA ERC20, NTVRK, AVAXC (Avalanche C-Chain), POOLZ, XYO, ARPA, BEL, FLUF, NEAR, CHZ, BSV, AVA BSC, KIBA, KIBA BSC, PIT, RBIF, SHIBBSC, CUDOS, ARV, BIFI, CULT, VOLT, 1INCH, BTTC TRC20, DOGECOIN (Buff Doge Coin), ETHW (Ethereum PoW), BONE, TON, TON ERC20, APE, TOMOE, TENSHI, GAFA, FLOKI, BSC, USDD TRC20, USDC MATIC, GHC, ETHBSC, PIKA, XCAD, GGTKN, DGMOON, HOTCROSS, 1INCH BSC, BTFA, BTTC BSC, GAL, GUARD, TTC, GRT, USDT SOL, QUACK, DIVI, ZBC (SOL)

More to come!

NOWPayments’ New Features in 2022

Optional burn for SHIB & LEASH

The first one in our list of new features is a huge Thank You to our beloved partnerSHIB & SHIBArmy: the Optional Burn feature. It allows you to count the percentage of your profit in SHIB or LEASH that you would like to burn. It’s very easy: log in to your account, go to Payment settings, and scroll down — the feature will be right there!

Check out more: Burn SHIB & LEASH with NOWPayments’ feature for merchants

Ecwid Crypto Payment Plugin

Our Ecwid plugin is here! Ecwid is an eCommerce platform that allows you to open an online store on your website or any online marketplace, blog, or social network.
Here’s how to start accepting crypto payments in your Ecwid store:

Log in to your Ecwid private cabinet,
Install the Ecwid plugin here,
Generate an IPN secret key in NOWPayments’ Payment Settings,
Then, go to the “Payment” section on Ecwid’s left menu,
Click the “Actions” button near the NOWPayments method, and paste your API key and IPN secret key,
Save changes. That’s all!

175 countries, 200k+ merchants worldwide, 160+ cryptocurrencies — what can be better?

Network Fee Optimisation

In May, we introduced our awesome (and very clever!) feature. As any merchant dealing with crypto knows, network fees can significantly reduce the income of businesses. That happens because the network fee depends on the currency and sometimes can be extremely high and volatile.

But NOWPayments’ Network Fee Optimisation helps businesses save on fees!

NOWPayments’ algorithm analyzes current network fees and picks the most profitable option out of your payout wallets. This helps you to earn more from each payment as the total fees charged for the payment will be lower than fees for mono-currency payments.

Learn more in our article: How to boost your crypto income with Network Fee Optimisation

Fiat withdrawals (Switchere Partnership)

Month of May was fruitful for us indeed: fiat withdrawals became available for our partners thanks to our new partnership with Switchere!

The solution allows the merchants to withdraw any amounts of cryptocurrency in fiat starting from 15 EUR up to the unlimited volumes. This feature can be used by any business who is eager to test crypto payments for the first time and wishes to withdraw crypto to fiat currency fast, easy and from any part of the world.

“Fixed Rate” Invoices

Do not be afraid of volatility! In November, we rolled out a Fixed Rate invoice—it completely solves the problem of changing prices.

We can freeze the exchange rate for 20 minutes so you avoid extra spending and don’t have to worry about underpayments!

All you need to do is to tick the “Fixed rate” option when creating a payment link in your Dashboard.

“Fee Paid by User” Invoices

Our partners are very important to us, that’s why we also introduced Fee Paid by User Invoices. Such invoices give an opportunity to transfer all payment fees from the Merchant to the User.

You can activate this feature on the “Payment link” when creating an invoice in your Personal Account or via API.

Enabling Custody in Your Account

Well, strictly speaking, this feature has been around for quite a time and was known as Balances. However, we rearranged its flow (and name): welcome Custody and feel free to enable it yourself (yay, no need to write to [email protected] and whitelist your IP!).

Now you can do it in your NOWPayments personal account just in a few minutes!

The custody feature allows you to save on network fees: as a business, you receive hundreds of crypto payments daily. You can withdraw a large amount to your wallet one time instead of paying out the network fee for each transaction because the fee for sending a deposit to your wallet is charged not on each separate payment but on the whole amount withdrawn!

Learn more here: How Secure Is the NOWPayments’ Custodial Solution?

P.S. By the way, you can also top up your Balance directly from Custody page in your account. Very handy for those merchants who do payouts!

The Internal Autoconversion Function inside Our Custody

Our latest big update before New Year: fast, easy, and cheap!

The internal autoconversion allows you to make swaps between your open balances inside our custody and operate your funds directly inside our service without withdrawing them from it.

Suppose you have two balances in ETH and USDTTRC-20. This great feature will give you the ability to swap any amount of USDTTRC20 and transfer them to ETH without taking them out of our custody solution. This feature is available for any token in which you have open balances (don’t forget: we have 160+ supported tokens, so the options are endless!)

Hurry to try our new feature and we will be glad to get your feedback!

Recurring Invoicing

In October we introduced a truly revolutionary feature (one out of three, to be precise!) under huge Billing umbrella — Recurring Invoicing.
It is a handy tool that helps any business owner automatically send an invoice to their customers via email.

Thanks to our flexible API solution for Recurring Invoicing, you can charge or pay their customers every time as much as you want to whilst also automating the payment flow management. Easy and efficient!

Custodial Recurring Payments

Another game changer among Billing solutions is NOWPayments’ Custodial Recurring payments: now our Merchants can manage the deposits of their Users created on their website and withdraw assets automatically according to a pricing plan via API.

Companies that are billing their customers on the personalized or consumption-based model can benefit from this tool. We can see marketplaces, projects from the gaming and gambling industries, SaaS, hostings and domain name providers, blockchain node providers, server rentals — you name it! Custodial Recurring Payments can fit any of your business needs!

Check out more: https://nowpayments.io/blog/accept-custodial-recurring-payments-with-nowpayments

Casino and Gambling Ecosystem (Extended Custody)

Our Custody solution and Custodial Recurring Payments provide major use cases for Casino, Gambling, Betting, or iGaming, creating a whole new Ecosystem that we also call Extended Custody.

The purpose and hallmark of this solution are to expand your sphere of control and allow us to help you achieve even more business goals.

Thanks to Casino Ecosystem, you can create deposit accounts for your players (not just displaying the balance with callbacks, but having real separate accounts within our system for everyone) and make free transactions between them and your Casino balance.

You, the Merchant, can accept all cryptocurrencies if desired, but only have one wallet in one preferred currency. All funds can be transferred to your wallet if you wish so or can be kept on Balances (no wallets needed to activate them). This helps reduce risks associated with storing a large number of volatile tokens on the master account balance.

There’s also an auto-conversion on the Deposit (User) accounts, so you can change the money directly on the Casino website if needed for the game!

That is definitely worth trying in 2023, right?

Get liquidity with CoinRabbit

In December, we partnered with CoinRabbit Loans: if you’re using our Custody (see above), you can add more use cases and make your crypto work for you!

CoinRabbit allows you to get liquidity for your business while saving crypto. Try via your NOWPayments Dashboard!

Fiat On-Ramp

You were waiting for this one, weren’t you? Letting your customers pay with fiat whilst accepting crypto is back again thanks to our EU-based partner Guardarian.

Fiat-to-crypto payments are available for API and invoices. Invoices are integrated into CMS plugins as a payment tool, so fiat payments are also possible there.

The flow looks like so:

Guardarian charges users with fiat. Customers pay the necessary amount and cover the fee: 1.5% + 2 USD. The service converts fiat to crypto and sends it to NOWPayments.
NOWPayments processes crypto received from Guardarian. At this step, the merchant pays a standard service fee of 0.5%.

That’s it! The customer paid in fiat money, and you will receive cryptocurrency just as usual.

Learn more at: https://nowpayments.io/blog/nowpayments-introduces-fiat-on-ramp

NOWPayments Updates in 2022

Status Page Epic Updates

Yes-yes, our Status page was probably one of the most updated pages in early 2022. Now it became a truly handy instrument for merchants and users! Let’s look in more detail:

Check the asset’s blockchain near its name
Sometimes it’s hard to remember all the chains, especially when the token is a multichain one. However, this small green tag helps avoid such mistakes as sending the payment in the wrong network because now you are absolutely sure whether it’s an ERC or BSC version of your favourite token

Check your Payment and Payout status
Easy: just go to the Status page and enter your Payment ID or Paying Address for Payments status, and Withdrawal/Payout ID for Payouts status.

Check minimum payment amount for each currency pair in USD

Minimum payment amount is a sum that is formed from the amount of network fees required for the transaction. To make things more convenient, we added the USD equivalent (as each currency has different rates and sometimes it can be tricky to do all the math in your head).

Check minimum payment amount for each currency pair in USD

Faster Statuses Incoming

This update made our Merchant experience a lot smoother! Payment’s statuses’ refresh rate was boosted down to 10 (!) seconds.
This means:

Payments’ statuses refresh a lot faster
You get callbacks with processed transactions faster
Your clients don’t have to wait for long to see the payment being processed.

Personal Account Update

The new navigation in Personal Account was launched — now merchants can manage their personal accounts on the NOWPayments website much easier!

Main Page and Logo Update

We have also updated the website design: new fonts, new logo, new main page look. Just check it out!

SiGMA Malta 2022

This overview wouldn’t be complete with our first big event after the pandemic. NOWPayments was thrilled to participate in SiGMA Malta summit that was held on 14-18th of November at the Malta Fairs and Convention Centre in Ta’ Qali.

Delegates shared plenty of insights about the emerging gaming tech, digital health, and affiliate marketing industries. We managed to meet lots of influencers, partners, and friends, as well as make new connections! We hope to see you all again soon at the next events!

Learn more at: SiGMA Malta and NOWPayments: Brief Overview

Wrapping up

We are eternally grateful to our partners, merchants, users, crypto communities for choosing us and providing support despite a challenging year of (mostly) bear market. We are looking forward to 2023 and can’t wait to see what it brings us!

Meanwhile, crypto keeps happening—let’s accept it!