Something quiet has been happening at the checkout counter. Across retail, hospitality, travel, and digital services, a segment of customers has begun arriving with purchasing power that most merchants are structurally unable to accept. They hold cryptocurrency, they want to spend it, and the infrastructure to receive it simply is not there. The result is a growing mismatch between where consumer financial behavior is heading and where merchant technology currently sits. For businesses that have built their models around capturing every available revenue opportunity, that mismatch is worth paying attention to.

The scale of the untapped market is not a trivial question. Global crypto ownership has crossed 741 million people, and surveys consistently show that a meaningful portion of that population acquired digital assets specifically to use them for purchases, not to hold them indefinitely. More than a quarter of high-income American consumers report they would actively switch merchants to find one that accepts crypto. That is not a niche preference. It is a purchasing behavior signal that the payments industry is only beginning to process.

Joshua Tate understood the merchant side of this problem before he fully understood the crypto side. His background was in law and real estate, fields defined by transactional complexity and the friction that accumulates when systems designed for one context are applied to another. When he moved into technology in 2017 and began studying cryptocurrency in earnest, what struck him was not the investment thesis but the infrastructure gap. Crypto had speed, security, and a growing user base. What it lacked, in his assessment, was broad merchant acceptability, one of the core characteristics that separates a functional currency from a speculative instrument. That gap became the founding logic of ForumPay.

The company Tate cofounded operates as a payment infrastructure business, a description he is precise about. ForumPay is not simply a gateway that routes crypto transactions. It owns and operates its own cryptocurrency exchange, aggregating real-time pricing from major exchanges to deliver optimal rates at the moment of each transaction. When a customer pays in Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDT, USDC, or any number of supported cryptocurrencies, the merchant receives settlement in their local fiat currency at the original retail price. The volatility risk, the element that has historically been the primary obstacle to merchant adoption, is absorbed at the exchange layer and does not pass through to the business.

Integration is designed to remove the other major barrier: technical complexity. ForumPay connects natively to major e-commerce platforms including WooCommerce, Drupal, Magento and most recently Shopify, and operates across online storefronts, physical retail environments, and mobile applications. For in-store use, the company offers a dedicated device that arrives preloaded and operational. For merchants who want to accept crypto in-app, a recent U.S. court ruling loosening Apple’s control over in-app payment systems opened that channel, and ForumPay has already built the functionality to support seamless in-app crypto checkout without redirecting customers away from the purchase flow.

The fee structure is similarly stripped down. Merchants pay one all-inclusive fee per transaction. There are no setup costs, no monthly charges, no chargebacks, and no PCI-DSS compliance exposure. For businesses accustomed to the layered cost structure of card processing, that makes a tangible difference.

Tate’s broader vision extends beyond the current product set. ForumPay has introduced subscription billing in crypto, allowing merchants to manage recurring payments for memberships and services. Development is underway on tap-to-pay functionality and other features designed to map crypto payment behavior onto the consumer habits that already exist, rather than requiring new ones. The goal, as Tate frames it, is to build the foundational rails that make cross-border, cross-currency commerce faster, cheaper, and genuinely accessible.

He has spoken about the lessons his time living across the Caribbean and Mediterranean taught him about how arbitrarily geographic financial systems are structured. Money, in his view, should operate as an international system. ForumPay is his effort to build a piece of that.