Payment Coin Wheel
The oldest promise in crypto, competing with a bank transfer.
Press Spin. Every coin on the wheel has the same chance.
Your cryptocurrencies
The payment coin wheel picks one of twenty payments-focused cryptocurrencies at random. This is the oldest use case in crypto and the one where the competition is not other chains but bank transfers and card networks.
The original use case
Paying someone was the first thing crypto claimed it would do, and it remains the hardest promise to assess, because the competition is not other blockchains. It is a card network that settles in milliseconds and a bank transfer that, domestically, is free and instant in a growing number of countries.
Against that, a payments chain has to be better at something specific. The honest answer is usually cross-border: sending money between countries remains slow and expensive through incumbent rails, and the gap is wide enough that a worse technology can win on price alone.
Most volume is not payment
On-chain activity looks like enormous adoption until you ask what the transactions are for. The overwhelming majority are trading, moving funds between exchanges, or interacting with protocols. Actual commerce — someone paying someone else for a thing — is a small fraction almost everywhere.
That is not damning; payment networks take decades to build and the ones we have took exactly that. But it does mean transaction counts are close to useless as evidence of payment adoption, and they are the number most often cited as though they were.
The irony of the exclusion rule
This site removes stablecoins from every wheel, on the grounds that landing on a dollar token has not picked anything. On this wheel that rule bites hardest, because stablecoins carry most of the genuine payment volume in crypto. The coins that best serve this use case are the ones the wheel cannot show you.
That is a deliberate trade and it is worth naming rather than hiding. The wheel holds twenty payments-focused cryptocurrencies and picks one at random. The largest real answer to "what do people actually pay with" is elsewhere.
What is on this wheel
| Rank | Ticker | Name |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | BNB | BNB |
| 8 | TRX | TRON |
| 10 | DOGE | Dogecoin |
| 13 | LEO | UNUS SED LEO |
| 17 | BCH | Bitcoin Cash |
| 25 | HBAR | Hedera |
| 31 | CRO | Cronos |
| 62 | STABLE | Stable |
| 76 | NEXO | Nexo |
| 103 | LUNC | Terra Classic |
| 105 | PIEVERSE | Pieverse |
| 112 | XPL | Plasma |
| 114 | CFX | Conflux |
| 122 | ZBCN | Zebec Network |
| 136 | TEL | Telcoin |
| 147 | MANA | Decentraland |
| 149 | CHZ | Chiliz |
| 159 | AWE | AWE |
| 170 | BAT | Basic Attention Token |
| 171 | GLM | Golem |
Market data provided by CoinMarketCap — CoinMarketCap. Rank, ticker and name only; this site stores no prices.
This list is a judgement about what belongs in the category, not a market-cap ranking, so it carries no date. See how the lists are chosen.
Questions
Which coins are on the payment coin wheel?
All 20 of them are printed under the wheel: BNB, TRX, DOGE, LEO, BCH, HBAR, CRO, STABLE, NEXO, LUNC, PIEVERSE, XPL, CFX, ZBCN, TEL, MANA, CHZ, AWE, BAT and GLM. Stablecoins and wrapped tokens are left off, and you can replace the whole list in Custom mode.
Do people actually pay with these?
Some volume is genuine, particularly for cross-border transfers where the incumbent option is slow and expensive. Most on-chain activity, though, is trading rather than paying for anything.
Why are stablecoins not on this wheel?
They are excluded everywhere on this site. A wheel landing on a dollar token has not picked anything — which is a little ironic here, since stablecoins carry most of the real payment volume in crypto.