14 years ago, a nine-page document was published on The Cryptography Mailing List.

Penned by a mysterious entity we know only as Satoshi Nakamoto, it outlined the blueprint for a digital currency that required no banks, no middlemen, nor any centralized entity.

This digital currency — Bitcoin — launched a month later. And in that moment, the spark that would ignite a financial revolution was created.

Now, few people haven’t heard of cryptocurrency. Depending on who you ask, Bitcoin's a speculative asset. A handy way to pay online. A store of value. Or even the foundation for a parallel economic system.

Of course, the industry is much bigger than Bitcoin today. Ethereum, XRP, Solana, and a whole slew of other protocols make up an industry which, at the time of this writing, boasts a market capitalization of over one trillion US dollars.

But entering this exciting new paradigm isn’t exactly easy. The mainstream still faces a glaring issue: accessibility. A lack of user-friendly bridges into the ecosystem leaves many on the sidelines, eagerly awaiting an easier path to the wonderful world of cryptocurrency.

Enter the fiat-to-crypto onramp.

What is a crypto onramp?

Your customers want to buy crypto. But all they’ve got is a bank balance denominated in USD, EUR, GBP or one of those other boring, old-school currencies.

💡 Fiat is Latin for “it shall be.” This refers to the fact that the currencies we use hold value because the issuing government says so.

Swapping fiat currency for another fiat currency is easily done — most banks will do it for you. To go fiat-to-crypto, though, you’ll need a third-party service that takes your money and exchanges it for your cryptocurrency of choice. This is what we call a crypto onramp, and they come in many forms:

Bitcoin ATMs

You’d be forgiven for mistaking these for regular cash machines. You can typically find them in public spots, and the premise is simple: you feed them cash (either physically or by card), and they send BTC to an address of your choosing.

Centralized exchanges

By far the most popular onramps. Here, you create an account, submit KYC information (identity documents, facial verification and proof of address) before getting access to the crypto markets.

Depending on the venue, you can fund your account with fiat currency via bank transfers, card payments, and more. Kraken, Binance and Coinbase are all examples of centralized exchanges.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) exchanges

A peer-to-peer (P2P) exchange is an online venue, too, but it doesn’t work like its centralized counterpart. Rather, it connects buyers and sellers directly.  One party posts a listing (“I’d like to buy/sell BTC at a price of [price] per coin for [payment method]”), and the other can choose to accept it.

P2P exchanges generally have a wider variety of payment methods — after all, it’s up to the user what they want to accept, be it cash, gift vouchers, PayPal or bank transfers.

LocalBitcoins is a popular player in this category.

Integrated fiat onramps

It doesn’t roll off the tongue like some of the others, but don’t let that throw you off: these are particularly valuable for crypto businesses that want to reduce the hurdles for first-time users.

Consider, for example, a decentralized application (dApp). Since they run on crypto, their users need to come prepared. To a new user, that can be a bit daunting. Do you really want to tell them to:

1. Sign up for a centralized exchange
2. Wait for KYC approval
3. Deposit fiat
4. Figure out how to buy the right crypto
5. Set up MetaMask
6. Withdraw their crypto
7. And, only after all that, finally start using your app?

A third-party solution can strip out most of the headache with an integrated widget. Once they land on your site/wallet/exchange, users can just choose their input currency (fiat), their output currency (crypto), and click a button to check out as they would on an e-commerce store.

The third-party may require some additional information from them, but they’ll get it directly via the widget — ensuring that customers don’t get sidetracked on some laborious quest to purchase crypto.

For examples of this, look to services like MoonPay, Transak or Coinify.

What’s the best onramp solution?

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. It depends on the user’s goal (are they buying once? Buying regularly? Trading dozens of pairs?), their country, and their tolerance for fees.

Cards on the table: we have a slight bias towards the integrated solution — particularly for businesses. It’s true of any wallet, app or platform: once you’ve captured a user’s interest, your number-one priority is to onboard them as seamlessly as possible.

In sending prospects away, even for a brief period, you risk losing them altogether. The right onramp, neatly available on your own website, can really make a difference if you implement it right.

But why choose just one?

Onramper aggregates nine different crypto onramp providers to match your users with the one that will best work for them.

For your users, it means higher transaction success rates (wherever they are) and a streamlined portal into the crypto world.

For you? It’s a headache-free, plug-and-play add-on that instantly delivers greater value to your customers.

Let us do the heavy lifting, so you can focus on what you do best.

Book a call with our experts to find out how Onramper can turbocharge your success rates.

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We’re thrilled to announce our recent partnership with premier DeFi platform Sushi — a decentralized exchange where users can trustlessly swap between hundreds of tokens across dozens of networks.

By integrating the Onramper widget, Sushi immediately expanded its global reach. With one simple integration, they’ve added nine onramps to turbocharge the success rates of users’ fiat-to-crypto transactions — all while making sure they get the best exchange rates.

For users, it means less of the dreaded transaction failed messages. Which is a lot more common than you think: as unveiled in our recent Global Crypto Onramp Report, up to 50% of fiat-to-crypto swaps fail, even after identity verification.

Now, Sushi taps into an intelligent router that takes into account over 70 factors to calculate which onramp is most likely to ensure success. Its customers can now spend less time onboarding into the crypto ecosystem, and more time exploring all it has to offer.

"We are excited to partner with Onramper to provide our users with a better onramping experience,” said Jared Grey, Sushi’s CEO. “This integration will help us to achieve our goal of becoming the leading decentralized exchange in the market and we chose Onramper for the stability of their infrastructure and their one-of-a-kind orchestration service."

We’re delighted to be the provider of choice for such an exciting Web3 project. As you may know, our stack is designed to work with a vast range of crypto platforms — ranging from cutting-edge DeFi protocols and wallets to leading exchanges like BitMex.

Want to find out how Onramper can work for you? Book a call with our experts today.

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You’re a provider of the cryptocurrency space’s most critical infrastructure.

Maybe you run a digital wallet or exchange. Maybe you’ve launched a cutting-edge Ethereum dApp that’s racking up volume. Or maybe you’re pushing the boundaries on the latest and greatest DeFi, NFT or metaverse platform.

Wherever you land, you’re here because you want to provide your users with an easy, no-nonsense portal into crypto — so you can get them using your product faster.

An integrated fiat-to-crypto onramp is a fantastic choice. It’ll allow you to focus your resources where they count, without the added headaches of building a whole new stack and getting the right licenses.

All onramps are not created equal, however. Here’s what you need to consider.

Success rates

It’s a well-kept secret among fiat onramps, but transaction failure is alarmingly high across the board. The factors that can get in the way of a seamless fiat-to-crypto swap are numerous, ranging from KYC failures to poor UX.

We’re not talking about a handful of isolated incidents, either. Our recent Global Crypto Onramp Report, in collaboration with CoinTelegraph, identified that most fiat-to-crypto transactions fail — 50% after KYC.

It’s worth discussing this glaring issue with prospective partners. Every hurdle your users face is costing you business.

Alternatively, you may want to consider using an onramp aggregator — which intelligently routes to the onramp with the highest likelihood of success in real-time.

Reach

The magic of crypto is that it brings together individuals from all across the globe. There’s just the small matter of individuals actually getting crypto in the first place.

It’s impossible to recommend an onramp that caters to all users. After all, your Canadian users have very different payment options available than your Cambodian ones. What may work for identity/proof-of-address verification for your users in Ireland may not even be possible for those in India.

If you do cater to a truly global audience, you need a solution that accounts for these geographic differences. Integrating multiple onramps is an option, but it also drastically increases the work required from you to maintain them or replace them in case of downtime.

Make sure you understand where your users are coming from — and which solution(s) are best suited to them. Or, just integrate an aggregator, which gives you the reach of multiple onramps through a single extension.

Fees

The elephant in every crypto room.

As if navigating success rates and reach wasn’t enough, you’ll also need to be mindful of the fees your prospective onramp charges. Which is tricky in itself, because even two services that offer the same upfront fee will differ in the amount of cryptocurrency they dispense, owing to different conversion rates, spreads, and blockchain network fees.

You want to give users the best bang for their buck. But you should also recognize that fees are second to success rate — what good is a fee if the user can’t complete a transaction?

Aggregation: the best of all worlds

Ultimately, the best onramp for your users is the one that works. And, realistically, you’re not going to get consistent success from a single onramp.

It can be frustrating. Somewhere out there, the perfect bridge from fiat to crypto exists for a particular user. But if they use the wrong one, they might just give up and leave your platform.

Nobody wants that. Which is why we built Onramper — a comprehensive solution that matches your user with their perfect bridge, based on over 70 different factors.

We partner with several of the industry’s top fiat-to-crypto onramps (including Banxa, BTC Direct, and Coinify) so you don’t have to. Through a single, powerful widget, you’ll enjoy better coverage, lower fees, and less time integrating and maintaining partial solutions.

Want to find out how Onramper can work for you? Book a call with our experts today.

Today, we’re undertaking our biggest step yet in the movement towards unlocking crypto’s potential for the masses. The new, updated Onramper widget offers better performance, improved documentation, and is built on a brand new architecture that is based on a modern microservice design framework. We’re also excited to introduce a new visual universe across the website and widget, which is a product of extensive research and will delight both end users as well as technical and product teams at leading wallets, DEXs and CEXs.

Buy crypto with the new widget

New Fiat-Crypto Onramping Widget

Our widget has undergone a technical and visual (more on that later) upgrade. First and foremost, it leverages a completely new and improved architecture under the hood, optimizing performance, scalability, and easier maintenance. For you, this means reliable service, a smoother user experience, and more frequent product improvements in the future. You focus on your business while we focus on onramps.

Today we support over 95 fiat and 240+ crypto currencies, offer 35 local payment methods in more than 190 countries and work with 9 major onramps. Ahead of launching the new widget, we’ve conducted a series of tests and kept the end users front and centre. The widget’s new UI improvements take this into account and will make it easier to present the range of services in one concise look, thereby simplifying the trading or swapping experience and increasing your success rates.

Lastly, we’ve introduced - and will continue to improve - new and more robust documentation. The developer experience is the bridge between the financial infrastructure and wider crypto adoption, and we want to make it as easy as possible for your technical team to integrate and troubleshoot Onramper.

Check out the new API docs

New Logo, New Website, and Fresh Approach to Onramping

We are also beyond thrilled to be introducing a new logo and new colors to the Onramper website, widget, and documentation. The central element of the 360° new look is the flick of a switch.

This element rests on our beliefs that consistency is the foundation of trust and that usability and intuitiveness for the developer and end user experience are worth obsessing over. With a process as easy as flicking a switch and one of a kind global reach, Onramper brings seamlessness and flexibility to crypto transactions as well as onramp management.

Logotype

Drawing from the toggle, the O-switch avatar is simple, strong and instantly recognisable on all digital surfaces. We’ve opted for lowercase letters to convey the ease of integration that underpins our product (less than one hour) and to signal that crypto infrastructure doesn’t have to be complicated. Lowercase notwithstanding, in our communication with you, we will continue to spell Onramper the old way.

Motion

The focus on what happens within the transaction and flexibility have to be present in all parts of the design, and motion graphics are no exception. We also use the design DNA from the circle shape of the O-switch in all graphic assets, from UI assets and 3D graphics to functional icons. The graphic pattern visualizes the Onramper universe with all of its possibilities – a grid of opportunities always in flux, an ever changing element that adapts to your needs.

Colour

There is no shortage of blue in the crypto or finance universe. Selecting green was not just about differentiation, but also about determination. Our determination to further support our message that crypto services can be trustworthy, fresh, and innovative. This is where green as a primary color paired with black and white (plus secondary tech blue) comes in.

What’s Next for Onramper

Unlocking the potential of crypto for the masses remains our pursuit, and we’re committed to it more than ever. In 2023, we will continue this journey in a way that is unique to Onramper by focusing on building the best and most comprehensive onramp aggregation platform.

First, we will further expand our global reach. In the coming days and weeks, we will announce a series of onramps that focus on serving different parts of the world. With 35 local payment methods in 180+ countries and growing, further increasing localized support in the Middle East, Asia and building redundancies in other places is essential to give your business an edge.

Second, we will continue improving transaction success rates so you can see your volumes grow. With our dynamic transaction routing engine, on average, we increased transaction authorization rates by 70%. Introducing advanced routing capabilities will help further push this number up while providing your users with the best rates.

Third, we will simplify the end user experience. A three step fiat-crypto onramping widget was the start. We will continue to invest in user research, and we believe that we can make this experience even faster. We’ve dissected each of the hurdles preventing users from having a smooth experience and will be introducing massive improvements to each of those throughout the year.

The new widget and look and feel are just the start, and we look forward to sharing more news, features, and announcements with you soon. Thank you for being part of our journey!

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