Faster Payments and Blockchain Technology Solutions Drawing Millions from Investors in Q1 2025
The speed of transactions has rapidly become both an important place to address for business and a major selling point to customers. However, speedy transactions have long been questioned for how well they can be enacted securely and in line with the law. With the advent of the blockchain, speedy transactions could suddenly be both secure and transparent, and with some extra work to create trust in the tech, viable as a fast payment solution.
Desires to have fast and cost-effective payments have only grown over the last decade, and especially of late, fuelling a good amount of interest from investors in promising startups and new blockchain-based solutions. In the first quarter of 2025, we saw a whole host of promising projects get millions of dollars pumped into them from investors.
Why Focus on Faster and Easier Payments?
In the always-connected online world, people generally expect to just get payments quickly. This is sometimes the case, with eWallet transactions sometimes taking mere hours or sometimes minutes. For the most part, though, payments are much slower than people want. As a result, payment speed is a big selling point in some sectors. Take iGaming, for example.
The competitive space sees platforms battling on several fronts, from game library size to app usability. Then, there’s payment speed. As players want to be able to withdraw their winnings as quickly as they can make deposits, the fastest paying online casinos are very popular. According to BonusFinder, their list here shows three major platforms that payout between three and 24 hours, making them the fastest payout casinos with Play+. It’s not just in iGaming, though.
Other online-centric people want faster payments, which is why Alchemy has created a new way to pay influencers based on projected earning to get money to them quicker. For businesses in general, though, cutting the costs of payments through faster and more automated means is even more sought-after now. American Express, in this article, hailed blockchain as being able to lower the cost of trade finance, and now, trade is seeing huge disruptions and increased fees by way of tariffs.
Millions Pumped into Fast Finance Firms
Blockchain technology is clearly being seen as the path to more cost-effective, faster, and more efficient payments locally and around the world. In March of this year, Halliday brought in $20 million from Andreessen Horowitz to further its ability to help financial institutes use blockchain and AI to automate services. In an adjacent space, the credit card issuer that allows for payments in stablecoin, Rain, received $24.5 million in funding.
With cryptocurrencies being reliant on blockchains, there’s certainly a trend towards empowering crypto as a payment method as well as adapting existing fiat currency payment systems to efficient blockchain solutions. Also in March of this year, we saw MoonPay acquire Iron, which specializes in stablecoin infrastructure, to improve its ability to offer transactions that are cost-effective, borderless, and fast, as this news report shows.
It was a busy quarter for blockchain and crypto payment businesses, with millions being pumped in to further help to realize the potential of the tech. As speedy and efficient payments become more coveted in global finance, investments such as these might just become more commonplace.
