Why Leading Crypto Exchanges Are Partnering with PayFi Giants

Since past month, the web3 industry is witnessing a common move by crypto exchanges. Announced fragmented and in a week’s intervals, this move is indicating an emerging trend seeing an unprecedented surge towards a strategic pivot: major crypto exchanges are no longer trying to build their own payment rails from scratch – they’re integrating with incumbent TradeFi and PayFi giants.

These exchanges include the big names of the likes of Kraken, Binance, Coinbase – however, what exactly does this common move signifies and why are the industry’s leading players following it.

Crypto Exchanges Partnering with PayFi Giants

To begin with, take few examples. JPMorgan Chase and Coinbase announced a multi-stage integration: starting in fall 2025, Chase credit-card customers will be able to use their cards to fund purchases on Coinbase; in 2026 Chase cardholders will also be able to redeem Chase Ultimate Rewards for USDC and link accounts directly to Coinbase. This is a bank-grade onramp to crypto for ~80M Chase customers.

Kraken launched PayPal as a funding option for U.S. users in early August 2025, enabling near-instant USD deposits via PayPal balance, linked bank or card without traditional wires or bank logins; a soft launch moved >$1M in deposits. Kraken also added support for PayPal USD (PYUSD) on its platform.

In another instance, PayPal launched its “Pay with Crypto” feature allowing U.S. businesses to accept payments in 100+ cryptocurrencies. With this, the merchants can receive settlement in PYUSD (PayPal’s stablecoin) with promotional low fees.

On August 7, Binance announced payments-rail integration with Mastercard. As part of it, it launched Sell-to-Card and Withdraw-to-Card flows that let users convert crypto to fiat and push fiat directly to their Mastercard debit/credit cards. It has initially rolled out the service to users in the EEA & UK, with EUR payouts supported.

Also Read: Another Kraken Lawyer Departs the Exchange

Behind the Move

The strategy behind the move isn’t too tough to guess. Onramps and offramps are the biggest adoption bottleneck for retail users. Card and banking integrations collapse the time-to-first-trade by allowing consumers to use familiar rails (cards, PayPal, bank links) rather than forcing an entirely new payments habit.

Tying exchange rails to established payments and banking networks accelerates user onboarding, reduces settlement friction, and repositions digital assets as a utility for everyday commerce.

The result: exchanges get scale and mainstream distribution; banks and card networks get exposure to a fast-growing asset class and new product flows.

Thus, the arrangement signals how banks are shifting from gatekeepers to embedded crypto distributors with the potential rightly gauged by crypto exchanges.

Also Read: Former Netflix and Meta Engineers Launch Blockchain