CoinGate, and what it's actually built for

Most people who search CoinGate are about to do one of two very different things, and the answer differs for each.

The two halves

The payment gateway. CoinGate has processed crypto payments for merchants since 2014 from Lithuania, licensed by the country's Financial Crime Investigation Service and operating under EU crypto-asset rules. Dozens of coins in, euro or dollar settlement out, plus a point-of-sale app. If a shop's checkout offers "pay with crypto", this is often the thing behind it — and in that case you are paying the shop, at the shop's price, with CoinGate converting in the middle.

The gift card marketplace. Separately, it sells gift cards for thousands of brands against crypto. Same shape as any card shop: you send coins, you get a code, and the code is worth its face value.

Is CoinGate legit? It is a licensed EU processor with more than a decade of operating history and public regulatory registration — as concrete an answer as this question gets. What licensing does not do is change what you pay.

What neither half does

Neither route lowers the price of the thing you are buying. A gateway converts your crypto to the merchant's dollars at checkout; a card shop converts it to store credit at parity. Both are conversions. The number on the invoice is the store's number either way.

The third shape

A discount can only come from somebody who values store credit at less than its face value — the person holding a gift card they will not spend. FlipGift is built around exactly that: they place your order with their balance, you pay them below the store's price, and escrow holds the money until you confirm the item arrived.

When to use which

Use the gateway when a merchant you already want to buy from accepts it — that is a clean, regulated way to pay in crypto. Use the card marketplace when you need credit at a brand fast, anywhere in the world. Use an escrowed order when the thing you want is a physical item from a US store and you would rather pay less for it than pay list price in a different currency. How that works here → · What the escrow actually holds →

Other routes, compared the same way

Bitrefill · BitPay · eGifter · Coinsbee · Gyft · CoinCards · CryptoRefills · NoOnes · Lolli · Fold · Purse.io · Paxful

One page per service, each saying where that service is the better tool than an escrowed order. How ours works →