Which Big Brands Actually Accept Crypto Directly in 2026

Marriott does not accept cryptocurrency. Neither does Hilton. If you search either question you will find dozens of pages that imply otherwise, and every one of them is describing a gift card bought from a third party, not a payment the hotel receives.

The gap between “accepts crypto” and “you can somehow pay with crypto” is the subject here. We checked sixteen brands against first-party sources on 2026-09-07 and sorted them into three buckets: direct (crypto goes through the brand’s own checkout), indirect (a third party takes your crypto and hands the brand dollars), and dropped (they used to, they stopped, and the internet never updated). A fourth bucket holds the brands we could not confirm either way, which we list rather than guess at.

The short version: direct acceptance is rarer than the listicles suggest, it is concentrated in digital goods, single-store retail and high-ticket vehicles, and almost all of it settles to fiat through a custodial processor before it reaches the brand.

The three ways a brand “accepts crypto”

These are not shades of the same thing. They differ in who holds the coin, who bears the price risk, and whether the brand did any integration work.

Direct acceptance means you select a crypto option on the brand’s own checkout. Behind it there is usually a processor that converts to fiat on the spot, so the brand books a dollar amount and never holds the asset. The brand did integration work and made a commercial decision.

Indirect acceptance means you buy a gift card, voucher or booking from a third party using crypto, then spend that instrument at the brand. The brand has no crypto relationship, no integration, and typically no knowledge that the purchase originated in crypto. This is what happens when you “pay for Marriott with Bitcoin.”

Dropped means the brand genuinely accepted crypto at some point, then removed it. These are the most miscited entries on every list, because the announcement generated hundreds of articles and the removal generated almost none.

What we found, brand by brand

Every row below was opened and read on 2026-09-07. The verification column matters: a first-party page on the brand’s own domain is a much stronger signal than a processor’s directory entry, and both beat a news article from 2021.

Brand	Status	What we actually found	Verification
Tesla (Tesla Shop)	Direct	Dogecoin only, on eligible shop items. Tesla publishes its own wallet address at checkout, warns that confirmation can take up to six hours, and states that Dogecoin orders cannot be cancelled, returned or exchanged.	First-party: Tesla Support
Microsoft	Direct, scoped	Bitcoin can be redeemed to add money to a Microsoft account balance, spendable in the Windows and Xbox stores only. Explicitly not usable in the Microsoft online store, non-refundable once added, and not available in all countries. Microsoft dropped Bitcoin from the Windows Store front end back in 2016 while keeping this balance top-up.	First-party: Microsoft Support
Ferrari	Direct, dealer-level	Crypto payment for cars, launched with US and Canadian dealers in October 2023 and extended to European dealers from late July 2024 via BitPay. It is opt-in per dealer, not a company-wide checkout, and the processor converts to fiat so the dealer carries no price exposure.	First-party: Ferrari corporate
Namecheap	Direct	Bitcoin accepted for domains, hosting, SSL and privacy, routed through either BitPay or a self-hosted BTCPay Server instance added in 2020. Funds land on the account balance rather than paying the order directly.	First-party: Namecheap Support
Newegg	Direct	BitPay appears as a payment method on Newegg’s own checkout. Newegg has run this since 2014 and extended it across most of its country stores.	Processor directory: BitPay
AMC Theatres	Direct	Crypto selectable at checkout on AMC’s site and app for tickets and merchandise, again through BitPay.	Processor directory: BitPay
Gucci	Direct, in-store, partial	Crypto accepted at a subset of US boutiques through BitPay since 2022. We found no Gucci-owned page documenting it, only the processor and trade press, so treat the store count in circulation as unverified.	Processor and trade press only: WWD
Marriott	Indirect only	No crypto at Marriott’s own checkout. Gift card resellers say so in plain text: one states that Marriott US does not accept crypto but that you can buy a Marriott gift card with Bitcoin on their site.	Reseller disclosure: Bitrefill
Hilton	Indirect only	No first-party crypto payment path. Hilton inventory is bookable with crypto through crypto-native travel agencies that pay the hotel in fiat on your behalf.	OTA inventory: Travala
Delta Air Lines	Indirect only	Listed in BitPay’s merchant directory, which is why it shows up on “brands that accept crypto” lists. The page itself describes buying a Delta gift card in the BitPay app, not paying Delta at checkout.	Processor directory: BitPay
Airbnb	Indirect only	Same pattern as Delta. The directory entry is a gift card purchase flow, not an Airbnb checkout option.	Processor directory: BitPay
Amazon	Indirect only	No crypto payment method at checkout and no announcement of one. Every “Amazon accepts Bitcoin” claim we followed traced back either to gift cards bought elsewhere or to the recurring 2021 job-listing rumour, which never produced a payment option.	No first-party crypto page exists
Expedia	Dropped, then indirect	Accepted Bitcoin directly from 2014 and stopped on 10 June 2018. Since 2020 Expedia Group inventory has been bookable with crypto through Travala’s API integration, which is an entirely different arrangement. Most lists still file Expedia under “accepts Bitcoin.”	Trade press: Finance Magnates
Starbucks	Dropped	Never a direct crypto checkout. Crypto spending ran through the Bakkt consumer app, which shut down on 16 March 2023. The Starbucks association survives on lists years after the mechanism stopped existing.	Trade press: CoinDesk
Twitch	Unclear	Removed Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash in March 2019, reinstated them roughly three months later, and has since stopped documenting or promoting the option. We could not find a current Twitch page confirming or denying it.	Removal reported by CoinDesk; no current first-party page
AT&T	Could not confirm	Announced crypto bill payment via BitPay in May 2019 and it was widely covered. The only page still asserting it is the processor’s own, last published in May 2023. There is no AT&T-owned page and no BitPay directory entry. We are not willing to call this live.	Stale processor claim only

Two more we deliberately left out. Overstock is on essentially every list as the first major retailer to take Bitcoin, which is true of 2014, but the brand now sits inside a restructured group and we could not reach a current first-party payment page, so we will not assert its 2026 status either way. The same applies to the Whole Foods and GameStop entries that trace back to the Flexa and Spedn rollout: the 2019 coverage is real, and we found nothing current confirming those retailers still accept it.

Why so many of these lists are wrong

The mechanism is easy to reproduce. BitPay’s merchant directory serves two structurally different page types under identical URLs. Open the Newegg entry and the instruction is “select BitPay at checkout.” Open the Delta or Airbnb entry and the instruction is “choose a gift card to buy, pay for your gift card with crypto.” Scrape the directory and you get one flat list of 250-plus brands, and that list is what most “who accepts crypto” articles are built from.

The second failure mode is that announcements propagate and withdrawals do not. Expedia’s 2018 exit and the Bakkt app’s 2023 shutdown were each covered a fraction as heavily as the launches they ended, so the launch coverage still dominates search results eight and three years later.

This is not a problem unique to brand lists. When we re-verified competitor gateway specs against their own pricing pages on 2026-08-31, we found the same secondhand-copying effect: CoinGate is widely cited as supporting 70-plus assets when its own site lists 11, and NOWPayments is widely cited at 0.5% when its published rate is 1%. We had repeated some of those numbers ourselves before checking. Anything you can only source to another article is worth re-opening.

What this means if you are the merchant, not the customer

Strip away the crypto framing and the direct-acceptance group has one thing in common: with the exception of Tesla, which publishes its own wallet address, they all route through a custodial processor that converts to fiat immediately. “Ferrari accepts Bitcoin” operationally means BitPay accepts Bitcoin and settles euros to the dealer. The brand never holds the asset, never manages a key, and carries no price exposure between checkout and settlement.

That model is a deliberate trade, and it costs real money. BitPay’s published rate is 2% plus $0.25 per transaction below $500K in monthly volume, dropping to 1.5% plus $0.25 between $500K and $1M and 1% plus $0.25 above that (checked 2026-08-31). For Ferrari that is irrelevant against the ticket size and the marketing value. For a merchant doing $40K a month it is worse than most card interchange, which is the opposite of the reason people usually look at crypto payments.

The alternative is non-custodial settlement, where funds go from the customer’s wallet to yours and no intermediary account exists in between. You keep the asset, you carry the price exposure until you convert, and the fee is lower because nobody is holding your money. Which one is right depends on a question that has a clear answer: if you need fiat in a bank account, you need a custodial processor with fiat settlement, and you should stop reading comparison tables and go find one. If you are willing to hold stablecoins and convert on your own schedule, non-custodial is cheaper and removes the counterparty. We have written up that split in detail in our custodial versus non-custodial comparison, and the fee side sits in the gateway comparison.

We should be direct about our own position, since we sell one of these. Aurpay is a non-custodial gateway at 0.8% per transaction with no fiat settlement at all. If your requirement is euros in a bank account the way Ferrari’s dealers get them, we are not the product; that is a genuine reason to pick a custodial processor over us, and it is the first thing worth checking before comparing anything else.

The network fee question, measured rather than repeated

One number the big-brand coverage never gets to is what moving the money actually costs on-chain. On 2026-08-31 we measured this ourselves rather than quoting vendor pages: two independent tools, three RPC endpoints cross-checked, Ethereum base fee sampled over 1,024 blocks at a median of 0.116 gwei, and Tron’s getEnergyFee at 100 sun.

A USDT transfer on ERC-20 came out at roughly $0.02. The same transfer on TRC-20 came out at $2.11 to $4.36. A Bitcoin mainnet transfer was around $0.12, and Lightning under a cent. That is the reverse of the received wisdom by about two orders of magnitude, and it holds because Ethereum’s base fee has stayed near a tenth of a gwei while Tron’s energy pricing has not moved down with it. It is a point-in-time reading, not a permanent law, so re-check it before making a chain decision.

Practically: for an inbound payment the customer pays the network fee, so your gateway rate is the number that hits your margin. The network fee becomes yours the moment you move, consolidate or refund. If you process a lot of small refunds, the chain you picked stops being a detail.

Can a small merchant do what these brands did?

Yes. The three models worth copying are all in the table.

The Microsoft model is account credit rather than order payment: the customer converts crypto into a balance, and everything downstream runs on your existing ledger. It sidesteps refunds entirely, which is why Microsoft marks the balance non-refundable. Good fit for subscriptions, top-ups and anything prepaid.

The Tesla model is single-asset, final-sale. One coin, clearly priced, no returns, a stated confirmation window. It is the least engineering work and the harshest customer policy, and it only survives on merchandise where the return rate is low.

The Ferrari model is opt-in at the location level for high-ticket items, where a 2% processor fee disappears into the margin and the acceptance itself is the point.

For a mainstream store the practical setup is narrower than the marketing suggests. On our side that means Bitcoin, Bitcoin Lightning, Ethereum, USDT on ERC-20 and TRC-20, USDC on ERC-20 and TRC-20, and DAI on ERC-20, across four networks: Ethereum, Tron, Bitcoin mainnet and Bitcoin Lightning. Integration is a Shopify Custom App built in your own admin under Develop Apps, or the official WooCommerce plugin, with Ecwid, BigCommerce, PrestaShop and OpenCart also supported natively. Aurpay’s terms are no contracts or banking details required, which is a lower barrier than the dealer-level agreements behind the Ferrari rollout but not the same thing as an absence of obligations elsewhere in your stack.

Worth knowing what the platforms themselves now do, because it changes the build-versus-buy question. Shopify added native USDC acceptance through Shopify Payments with Coinbase and Stripe, and PayPal’s Pay with Crypto lets approved US merchants take crypto and settle in USD, with New York excluded (both checked 2026-09-07). Both convert to fiat, both are custodial, and both are narrower in asset and network coverage than a dedicated gateway. They are the right answer if fiat settlement is your requirement.

If you run the hotel rather than book it

The Marriott question has a second audience: operators who noticed that the chains are absent from this table and want to be the property that is not. That is a different setup problem, with deposits, cancellation windows and rate-parity constraints that retail checkouts do not have, and we have written it up separately in our guide to accepting crypto at hotels and travel agencies.

For everyone else, the takeaway from sixteen verified rows is that direct acceptance is a normal commercial decision with a normal cost structure, not a milestone. Start with the settlement question, since it eliminates half the market immediately, then compare the survivors on rate and asset coverage in our crypto payment gateway comparison or the line-by-line breakdown in our gateway fee comparison. If you want to see how a non-custodial setup differs from the custodial processor behind most of this table, our Aurpay versus BitPay comparison puts both side by side.