This week, Gate Ventures, the venture capital arm of Gate.io, announced a strategic investment in the crypto payment network Mesh, quickly drawing industry attention despite not disclosing specific amounts. On one side is a fragmented jungle of crypto payments where wallets, exchanges, banks, and payment service providers are each fighting their own battles, while on the other side is the traditional payment system represented by card organizations and clearing networks, which is clear in its rules and highly standardized. The divide between the two is becoming increasingly apparent. In Gate Ventures' public statement, Mesh is directly positioned as "a key infrastructure that is expected to connect crypto payments with traditional payments," and the market is beginning to see it as a potential new hub that bridges the two worlds. This article will explore this judgment, analyzing how Mesh translates abstract capabilities into perceivable cost reductions and experience upgrades for merchants and payment service providers from the technical abstraction of payment tracks.
Fragmented Payment Jungle and Merchant Dilemma
● The reality of a fragmented ecosystem: In the current crypto payment landscape, users may frequently switch between multiple exchanges, different chain wallets, and various custodial accounts, leading to highly fragmented fund trajectories. For any merchant looking to integrate crypto payments, this means having to connect to multiple APIs individually, adapt to various identity and security rules, and face a complex integration topology in backend operations, where even a slight oversight could lead to reconciliation errors or security risks.
● Layered integration costs: Taking a cross-border e-commerce platform as an example, if it wishes to support payments from mainstream exchange accounts, multi-chain wallets, and some bank account deposits simultaneously, it needs to negotiate partnerships, perform technical integrations, and conduct compliance assessments with each service provider. Each new payment method adds extra development cycles, testing processes, and subsequent operational costs, while the operations team must establish different handling SOPs for customer service, risk control, and finance, leading to an exponential increase in overall complexity.
● The gap with traditional payment standardization: In contrast, traditional card organizations and payment networks typically require merchants to connect to a single interface provided by an acquiring bank or payment service provider, covering most mainstream card types and payment methods. Clearing, dispute resolution, and risk control standards are uniformly set by the network, resulting in strong interoperability and consistency in expectations. Currently, crypto payments lack a similar unified "connection layer," leading to inconsistent experiences across different scenarios, making it difficult for merchants to obtain a scalable and replicable solution like traditional acquiring.
The Ambition of a Single API Connecting Multiple Funding Tracks
● The technical path of payment track abstraction: The core idea of Mesh is to unify and encapsulate multiple funding tracks such as wallets, exchanges, banks, and payment service providers through a single API. On the backend, it adapts to the interface standards, identity authentication, and security protocols of different institutions; on the frontend, it exposes a relatively unified capability set to developers and merchants, allowing the caller to initiate commands in business language like "from account A to account B" without worrying about "which track the funds are currently on."
● Lowering the threshold for PSPs and SaaS acquirers: For aggregated payment PSPs and SaaS service providers offering payment capabilities, this abstraction means they can "outsource" a significant amount of integration work to the connection layer. They only need to connect with Mesh once to quickly assemble solutions that support various crypto and fiat funding tracks at the product level. Commercially, this compresses the cycle from project initiation to product launch and strengthens their bargaining and service capabilities with downstream merchants.
● Optimizing routing, settlement, and reconciliation processes: Another potential value of a unified interface lies in the unified routing and clearing logic of fund flows. Through the connection layer, the system can intelligently select paths between different tracks based on cost, timeliness, and compliance restrictions, while aggregating transaction data at the same level to simplify multi-source reconciliation processes. For finance and risk control teams, the previously scattered transaction flows across multiple platforms are consolidated into a unified view, making processes like anomaly detection, tax reporting, and compliance submissions easier to standardize.
Gate Venture's Bet and the Industry Chain Puzzle
● Judgments under the infrastructure narrative: Gate Ventures emphasized in its official statement that "Mesh is expected to become a key infrastructure connecting crypto payments with traditional payments," reflecting a judgment on the scarcity of payment connection layers: whoever can establish factual standards between multiple tracks has the opportunity to occupy a central position in the next stage of the crypto payment ecosystem. For a VC associated with a trading platform, such connection layers are not only financial investment targets but also key pieces in future ecosystem layouts.
● Synergy between exchange ecosystems and connection layers: From the perspective of Gate.io, the payment connection layer where Mesh resides can insert a programmable "transit network" between user assets remaining on the trading platform and those entering actual consumption scenarios. This opens up imaginative possibilities for Gate's future collaborations with PSPs, merchant platforms, and Banking-as-a-Service providers: no longer just an entry point for matching transactions, but a way to influence the flow of funds across broader scenarios through a partner network.
● Extension from transaction entry to payment exit: If we view exchanges as one of the main entry points for "funds entering the market," then connection layers like Mesh have the opportunity to become key exits for "funds exiting and being redistributed." For Gate, this extension from trading to payment across the entire chain expands its business from single in-market transactions to more stages of the user's complete fund journey, not only increasing touchpoints and data assets but also reserving space for future extensions in compliant payments, merchant services, and financial products.
Who Needs Mesh the Most: From Developers to End Users
● Demand resonance of typical user profiles: First, there are aggregated payment PSPs and payment gateways with a large number of small and medium-sized merchants, who urgently need to provide diversified crypto payment options without explosively increasing technical costs; second, there are Web3 native applications that hope to freely allocate user assets between wallets, exchanges, and bank accounts to support more complex in-app economies; third, traditional internet merchants who do not want to become blockchain experts but are unwilling to miss out on the payment needs of users holding crypto assets.
● Integration efficiency from the developer's perspective: For development teams, the biggest attraction of products like Mesh lies in shortening integration cycles. In the past, supporting payments from multiple exchange accounts, multi-chain wallets, and some bank payments meant researching each platform's API documentation, conducting compatibility tests, and maintaining multiple SDKs. With a single connection layer, developers can focus more on business logic and user experience rather than repeatedly "stepping into pitfalls" over interface differences and compatibility issues.
● Reshaping the end consumer experience: For end users, the maturity of such infrastructure is expected to make deposits, withdrawals, and cross-track payments smoother. Whether funds are currently in an exchange account, on-chain wallet, or a bank account, users only need to complete one authorization on the frontend to seamlessly choose the fund path during payment. Compared to today's users frequently transferring manually between platforms and waiting for confirmations, this seamless experience is closer to the fluidity offered by traditional mobile payments.
The Battle for Infrastructure: Who Sets the Standards
● The essence of the connection layer competition: Placing Mesh within a larger competitive landscape reveals that the core game at the infrastructure layer of crypto payments is who can set the factual standards. Once a connection layer achieves sufficient coverage among PSPs, merchants, and developers, its API design, risk control rules, and compliance templates will naturally evolve into "default options," forcing later entrants to incur costs to comply with this standard. This bears a strong resemblance to the dominant position of clearing organizations in traditional payment networks.
● Evolving from tradition to predict future patterns: Looking back at the development of traditional payment networks, early on there were also issues with multiple standards running in parallel and merchants having to connect repeatedly, ultimately leading to a few networks with dominant power through mergers, alliances, and regulatory intervention. In the crypto payment space, as the scale of funds increases and institutional participation deepens, a similar trend of centralization is likely to replay at the connection layer, with the market potentially converging into a few hub platforms with broad coverage and strong compliance capabilities.
● The spillover effect after becoming a hub: If Mesh can truly grow into one of them, its impact on the entire crypto payment ecosystem will far exceed the technical realm. A unified connection layer can more easily meet regulatory requirements, helping large volumes of funds enter and exit different tracks within a regulated framework, lowering the psychological and compliance barriers for traditional financial institutions and large merchants to accept crypto payments. Once this "compliance-friendly entry" is established, it will directly influence the pace and scale of mainstream institutions' allocation of crypto assets.
A Strategic Investment Perspective on the Next Chapter of Crypto Payments
Gate Ventures' bet on Mesh sends a clear signal: shifting from investments in single scenarios or application layers to a heavy layout on infrastructure and connection layers, attempting to occupy a favorable position in the next stage of the integration of crypto and traditional payments. It is important to emphasize that the specific amount and equity ratio of this strategic investment have not yet been disclosed, and whether Mesh can truly grow into an industry-level hub amid fierce competition still faces multiple uncertainties, including technology, compliance, and market education. Looking ahead, key indicators worth tracking include: Mesh's actual coverage on the PSP and merchant side, the depth of its integration with traditional financial institutions, compliance progress in major jurisdictions, and whether its API is becoming the "default option" in the developer ecosystem. The gap between the worlds of crypto and traditional payments is being filled layer by layer with new infrastructure, and this bet by Gate may just be the opening act of the next chapter.
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