Author: TechFlow, Deep Tide
"One of our colleagues was settling the bill at a restaurant in Da Nang and got to chatting with the waiter about crypto payments. The waiter said that Russians and Europeans often use stablecoins to pay by scanning a QR code. When asked if she knew about Bitget Wallet, she said she uses it herself."
What was even more surprising was that this waiter had previously worked as an Affiliate BD for a Web3 payment company called Pay with Crypto. According to her, the company later ceased operations due to regulatory reasons, and she became a restaurant cashier.
"A very interesting experience—you'd never expect it from a cashier," Bitget Wallet COO Alvin Kan shared this story with TechFlow.
Compared to grand narratives about crypto payments, the experience of this Da Nang restaurant waiter may better illustrate some changes. Crypto doesn't always happen in exchanges, industry conferences, or Web3 communities; it really does appear at the checkout counter of an ordinary restaurant.
Over the past two years, Bitget Wallet has gradually expanded into crypto cards, QR code payments, bank transfers, and tokenized stocks. Recently, a new bank deposit feature went live, quietly revealing another side of this wallet that was once known for on-chain trading.
From Wallet to Account
"For most people, opening a USD or EUR account is nearly impossible—it usually requires meeting complex identity, address, and compliance requirements," Alvin said when discussing the recently launched USD/EUR Virtual Account.
"But USD income is no longer limited to within the United States. More and more freelancers, remote workers, and cross-border businesses need to receive USD payments from overseas clients."
This new feature from Bitget Wallet differs from traditional crypto wallet services. Through a partnership with stablecoin payment infrastructure company Noah, users can obtain bank transfer receiving information. USD accounts support ACH, Fedwire, and SWIFT, while EUR accounts support SEPA. Once funds arrive, they are converted to stablecoins and enter the user's self-custodial wallet.
The payer does not need to hold crypto assets or understand blockchain; they can still transfer funds through familiar banking channels, while the recipient directly receives USD stablecoins in Bitget Wallet.
Bitget Wallet is not the first product attempting to lower the barrier to cross-border receiving; platforms like Wise and Payoneer have already established mature receiving services around such needs. Its difference lies in connecting bank receipts and payments directly to a stablecoin wallet: for users who wish to hold or transfer income in stablecoins, this reduces the intermediate steps of moving funds between traditional receiving platforms and crypto wallets.
Cross-border Finance Behind a Family Letter
"A while ago I watched 'Love Letters to Grandma,' which talked about how Chaoshan people in the past made a living in Southeast Asia and sent family letters and money back home through a method called 'Qiaopi.'"
Talking about this film, Alvin thought of the cross-border remittance needs that still exist around the world today.
"When we discuss cross-border remittances today, we focus more on fees and speed. But for many people, that money might be living expenses for the family or school fees for children—it's what they most want to send home after working hard in a foreign country."
Over a hundred years have passed, the ways people make a living across borders keep changing, yet the need to send money to family remains.
A 2026 report by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) shows that about 220 million migrants and overseas diaspora worldwide provide financial support to 1.1 billion relatives. In 2025 alone, cross-border remittances flowing into low- and middle-income countries reached $728.6 billion.
Alvin mentioned that Argentines working in New York need to regularly send money to family back home. Their salaries are paid in USD, but their families need pesos for daily expenses and may also want to keep some savings in USD. A single income often needs to go through different financial institutions and currency exchange channels to meet the living needs of two countries.
The internet has given cross-border livelihoods new forms.
"There's also a group of people who don't even need to work abroad," Alvin continued. "For example, a designer living in Buenos Aires provides remote services to a US tech company and receives a USD salary every month. She has never lived in the US, yet she needs to solve cross-border receiving, USD savings, and local spending."
Data from global payroll platform Deel shows that in Argentina, contractors receiving payments through the platform choose USD at a higher rate than local currency, and Argentina is also the country with the highest adoption rate of stablecoin payments on the platform.
For such remote workers, the value of Virtual Account is more concrete: they don't have to ask overseas clients to pay in cryptocurrency; instead, they can receive compensation through familiar bank transfer channels and then convert funds to stablecoins for holding or transfer.
From the Qiaopi of Nanyang overseas Chinese to today's remittances from overseas workers, and to the USD income of remote workers, cross-border finance has always been closely tied to ordinary people's livelihoods, families, and lives. And these people, who may not be familiar with Crypto, are also becoming the new users Bitget Wallet hopes to serve.
The Boundaries of Crypto and Bitget Wallet's Ambition
The launch of virtual accounts also gives clearer context to Bitget Wallet's product expansion over the past two years.
Virtual Account supplements bank receiving channels, Card and QR Pay connect crypto assets in the wallet to real-world consumption, and RWA products like Reality further expand global asset investment scenarios. Bank receiving, daily payments, and asset investment are beginning to appear in the same wallet.
But taken together, Bitget Wallet can hardly be defined simply as a traditional "crypto wallet" anymore.
For a long time, competition among crypto wallets mainly took place on-chain: how many public chains are supported, whether better trading quotes can be provided, how fast transactions are, and whether the latest alpha can be captured—these constituted important competitiveness for wallet products.
Bitget Wallet continues to build these capabilities, but as its business extends to cross-border receiving, consumer payments, and global asset investment, its competitors are also expanding from MetaMask and Phantom to fintech companies like Wise, Payoneer, and Revolut.
Interestingly, when Bitget Wallet tries to bring bank receiving channels into crypto wallets, traditional financial institutions are also exploring in the opposite direction.
In October, Western Union, with over 170 years of history, announced a partnership with stablecoin payment infrastructure company Noah, planning to let users receive cross-border remittances via stablecoins. Coincidentally, Noah is also the partner for Bitget Wallet's virtual accounts. An established remittance company begins to embrace stablecoins, while a crypto wallet tries to connect to traditional banking networks. Starting from different directions, the two meet at the same infrastructure service provider.
According to Bitget Wallet's disclosure in July this year, its global user count exceeded 100 million, and daily payment users surpassed daily trading users for the first time. For a wallet long centered on on-chain trading as its main use case, this is a noteworthy signal: users may no longer open the wallet solely to trade crypto assets.
But moving from on-chain trading to everyday finance requires far more than adding a few product features. Cross-border finance involves banking systems, payment networks, stablecoin issuers, and liquidity providers across different countries. What users want may just be a simple receipt or payment, but behind it multiple financial networks need to interconnect.
Bitget Wallet's proposed Onchain Payments Matrix is precisely an attempt to solve this coordination problem. It aims to integrate blockchain, stablecoin issuers, banks, payment institutions, card organizations, and local merchant networks into a coordinated network, allowing funds to flow between different financial systems.
However, connecting more financial services does not mean crypto wallets can replace banks. Accounts, clearing, fiat currency exchange, and local payment access still depend on financial institutions and partners in different regions, and compliance and service coverage are also unavoidable practical constraints.
More importantly, when a wallet begins to carry a user's salary, savings, and daily spending, the standards of competition also change. Traders may switch wallets for better quotes or faster speeds, but people who rely on it to receive income and pay bills care more about whether funds arrive on time, whether the service is stable, and whether problems can be resolved when they arise.
Bitget Wallet has already begun to step beyond the business boundaries of traditional crypto wallets, but moving from an on-chain asset management tool to a daily financial gateway still requires earning another kind of trust.
