2025 Payment Stats in Review: NanoGPT edition

We've been collecting payment statistics for over a year now, so we can do a full-year review of our most used coins and our learnings of 2025.

Tl;dr: Monero is used most, sometimes had more usage than all other coins combined, BitPay should integrate Monero and Nano, BTCPayServer is great, and if you want people to care about your coin, SPEDN not HODL.

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The big winner of the year was Monero. In some months Monero was used more than all other coins together! We're privacy-aligned and we're very happy that Monero is doing well.

Nano was second most used. Despite other coins having 100x the market cap, Nano is consistently most or second most used. It's a developer's and merchant's dream: instant transactions, zero fees, and clearly a lot of dedicated users.

3rd most used through the year was Bitcoin, especially once we also integrated Lightning. It's "actually used" a lot more than we had thought beforehand, mostly for larger transactions.

Fourth place is a close call, but for the year overall it goes to Litecoin (including MWEB transactions). Funnily enough, Litecoin is the one we hear least about from the community, but it's quietly used a lot.

Rising star: USDC, primarily on Base, has been taking flight recently - up to 10.85% this month and getting close to Bitcoin's share. This growth particularly accelerated after we launched x402 payments, making AI access easy for agents.

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The most used coins are largely what you'd expect. Most would expect Monero to do well - though perhaps not as well as it has. Most would expect Bitcoin, Litecoin and USDC to be used a fair bit, about on par with what we see. Most would not expect Nano to be used this much.

Our payment stats match BitPay's, to an extent.

Most used on Bitpay: Litecoin (#1), BTC (#2) then USDC/ETH (#3).

These coins are top 5 on ours, but two coins that Bitpay does not offer beat them by a landslide: Monero and Nano.

Makes us think Bitpay would do well to integrate Monero and Nano.

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Some coins disappoint. Some coins that are hyped are simply, unfortunately, not used. We had high expectations from EGLD and Kaspa, but have seen barely any payments using either coin. Same for some others. No diss, we'd have loved to see more usage of these coins ourselves.

Recommendations for merchants:

Use BtcpayServer. We love it. It supports Monero (#1), Nano (#2), Bitcoin (#3), Litecoin (#4), plus ZCash (also increasingly used) and Doge. Fully self-custodial. Amazing piece of software, fully open source.

Recommendations for crypto enthusiasts:

SPEDN. Seriously. Your coin might be technically fantastic, but as a merchant, it's most likely a pain to integrate - and frankly, we don't care about a coin unless it's actually being used. If you want your favorite cryptocurrency to gain merchant adoption, integrate with BTCPayServer, and use the coin.

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For the full post on this with a bit more info (and a gif!), see also our blog post: https://nano-gpt.com/blog/2025-year-in-review-payment-stats

We hope our stats can be useful. To judge the relevance: we currently receive about 6,000 crypto payments a month (roughly 1/4th of for example BitPay).

Always open to questions about this, and to any merchants wondering how to integrate crypto feel free to reach out!