As of this morning, Echelon accepts cryptocurrency and nothing else. This was not a positioning decision; it was the end of a five-year argument we kept losing.
How it went
Card networks push chargeback risk onto the merchant. Merchants manage that risk with fraud scoring. Fraud scoring needs identity. Every acquirer we have worked with arrived at the same request eventually: collect and retain identity documents for accounts above a threshold, then for all accounts.
We negotiated, we changed acquirers, we accepted worse rates and higher reserves. The fourth one made the request non-negotiable, and at that point the honest options were to start collecting passports or to stop taking cards.
What this costs
We expect to lose customers who simply do not hold crypto, and that is a real cost we have chosen to pay. What we get back is the elimination of chargebacks, fraud scoring, PCI scope, and the last personal data we were holding — all of which was deleted this week.
Forty-two assets are accepted through our processor, including Monero. Invoices carry whatever company name you type in, and we do not verify it.