The ECB asked 8,205 euro area firms which payment methods they accept. Crypto assets came in at 0.2% in online commerce and 1% at physical points of sale. Over the same stretch, mobile payments climbed from 36% to 68%.
Key Takeaways
- 0.2% of euro area online merchants accept crypto assets, against 1% in physical stores.
- The survey covers 8,205 firms across 21 countries, run between February 23 and April 10.
- Mobile payments jumped from 36% to 68% while crypto stayed under 1%.
8,205 Firms Surveyed Across 21 Countries, One Verdict
This is no opinion poll. The ECB had 8,205 companies interviewed across 21 euro area countries, through telephone interviews carried out between February 23 and April 10. The sample spans retail, restaurants and cafés, hotels, plus arts, entertainment and recreation venues.
The crypto result fits in a single figure. Crypto assets are accepted by 0.2% of online merchants, a share that the ECB survey on the use of payment methods places far below everything else it measures. In physical stores the bar rises to 1%, with no meaningful change since 2024.
Stablecoins fare no better than the rest. They sit in the same category and stay under the 1% mark at the point of sale, in 2024 as in 2026. The stable-value pitch, meant to remove the main merchant objection, has produced no measurable effect at the till.
That flat line follows three years of costly compliance work. The framework shut platforms down and even left ten million Europeans without access to their service on July 1. Merchant acceptance did not move.
Mobile Payments Double While Crypto Stalls
The comparison with other payment methods carries the real lesson. Cash is still accepted by 92% of physical merchants, cards by 88%. Both figures hold up after a decade of talk about their coming disappearance.
Mobile payments, meanwhile, took off. They went from 36% in 2024 to 68% in 2026, close to a doubling in two years. A payment method can clearly win over European merchants at speed when it answers genuine customer demand.
That contrast removes a comfortable argument from the industry. The gap between 68% and 0.2% cannot be pinned on merchant inertia, since both options arrived in the same window. It comes down to demand. Market cap says nothing about usage, which is why Tether flipping Ether at $186B in market cap did nothing at the till.
Merchants themselves spell out what drives the choice. Consumer preference ranks first at 26%, ahead of security at 22%. Neither criterion currently works in favour of crypto assets with the end customer.
The central bank draws its conclusion about cash rather than crypto. It warns that it is essential to ensure that increasing automation of payments neither hinders nor inadvertently weakens cash as a viable payment option. The stated priority remains protecting physical money.
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What MiCA Did Not Change at the Till
The gap between the two faces of the European file is getting hard to ignore. On one side a full regulatory framework, licences, institutional arbitration at the highest level. On the other, two online merchants in a thousand willing to take a crypto payment.
For issuers, the data shifts the ground of the argument. A European licence is defended on market access, yet that market still has to be built on the merchant side. The same imbalance appeared when the ECB weighed in on the fate of 37 million European customers, with compliance stakes far out of proportion to actual payment volumes.
In the short run the figure will be used as ammunition. It feeds the case for a public digital currency, which the ECB frames as the only credible occupant of the retail payments field, and it weakens the claim that private issuers have already solved usage.
Further out, attention moves to the use cases that actually work. Holding, investing and cross-border transfers carry most of the crypto activity in Europe, a long way from the card terminal. The shift recorded when 70% of the affected funds moved into self-custody describes that reality better than any merchant acceptance rate.
One question stays open for the next edition. Mobile payments doubled because customers asked for them at the counter. Nothing today points to comparable demand for settling a coffee in stablecoins, and that is what the ECB has now documented across 8,205 firms.
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