Paystand: The Payments Giants Quietly Supporting Bitcoin Circular Economies

Bitcoin Magazine

Paystand: The Payments Giants Quietly Supporting Bitcoin Circular Economies

While many hyper focus on the bitcoin price and its occasional intense volatility, there is a whole cohort of Bitcoiners that are quietly building Bitcoin circular economies with deep social impact around the world, in areas where Bitcoin is a save heaven asset today, compared to the local economies and circumstances.
One such company is Paystand, a B2B payments giant that has gone under the radar as a major user of Bitcoin for domestic and international corporate payments. Paystand enables companies to handle receivables, payables, expenses, cross-border payments, issue corporate spend cards, and streamlines payroll dynamics with Bitcoin-sensitive accounting software. Paystand serves mid to large corporate clients like Motorola.

By using Bitcoin as a financial settlement layer via its assurety protocol, Paystand provides fast, auditable, traceable transfers, serving as an alternative to legacy systems like checks, wires, and ACH. According to its CEO, Jeremy Almond, who talked to Bitcoin Magazine on the matter, the company has processed over $20 billion in payment volume per year and connects more than one million businesses on its network.

Almond, who co-founded Paystand, is a Bitcoin early adopter whose family was deeply affected by the 2008 financial crisis. In an interview with Frank Corva of Bitcoin Magazine, Almond shared some of his experiences with the Occupy Wall Street protest against the banks at the time and how all of this influenced his master’s thesis on “Why banks are too big to fail,” which in turn led him to Bitcoin. Almond has a deep background in tech entrepreneurship, while also being a surfer, which puts him in the company of other Bitcoin leaders who catch waves, like Jack Dorsey or Bitcoin Beach’s Mike Peterson. 

Bitcoin’s deep integration with Paystand is subtle. The company focuses on solving operational and payment related problems for large corporations, using Bitcoin’s world class volume and payments infrastructure in the background, it is not generally known as Bitcoin company, though it nevertheless is advancing Bitcoin adoption in very interesting ways. 

On the Bitcoin corporate front, Paystand takes a very different approach than companies like Michael Saylor’s Strategy, which walk through the front door to pitch a Bitcoin treasury allocation to executive boards, looking to influence companies from the top down. Paystand takes a very different strategy. Through its Teampay corporate spending cards, companies can earn Bitcoin rewards—denominated in satoshis—on everyday expenditures, such as a 1% cash back in sats. 

As Almond explained, “Our products are designed to sort of Trojan horse and orange pill large companies that might be skeptical to go all in on Bitcoin first… all of a sudden that company ends up with Bitcoin in the balance sheet, not by some big formal process, but by simply doing what they’re already doing and earning sats by their regular behavior.”

Sats rewards are far more valuable than random credit card points; they last forever and are deeply liquid, trending upwards in value over time, as Bitcoin does. Corporations just have to figure out how to access them and integrate them into their balance sheet, which means the call to integrate Bitcoin comes from inside the house for Paystand clients. 

When the call comes, Paystand is ready to build on this earned interest by assisting clients with integration. The company helps connect Bitcoin holdings to enterprise resource planning systems like Oracle, Microsoft, and Sage, handling reconciliation and accounting under standards such as FASB rules. Almond noted, “What we’re really good at is helping these organizations connect it back to their big financial system… And that’s really one of the things we’re an expert at.”

In November 2025, Paystand acquired Bitwage, a Bitcoin payroll and global payouts company founded in 2014 by Jonathan Chester and John Lindsay. Bitwage specializes in enabling businesses to pay international employees, contractors, and vendors in Bitcoin, stablecoins, or local fiat currencies, solving key accounting complexities, reducing cross-border fees and FX costs while offering flexible payout options across nearly “200 countries”, according to Bitwage. The acquisition integrates Bitwage’s expertise into Paystand’s enterprise network, expanding capabilities for global B2B transactions, including payroll and supplier payments, with full Bitcoin support. 

In a notable revelation during the interview, Almond disclosed that Paystand operates its own business-focused layer-2 solution tailored for enterprise needs, with upcoming announcements on additional L2 partnerships. In order to guarantee results and reliability, Paystand has also entered the Bitcoin mining industry. 

Almond told Bitcoin Magazine that “Today we are one of the top 25 largest miners in the world.” The expansion into mining came through their business relationships with various energy corporations, to which they provide payment services. “Increasingly, the energy industry and the Bitcoin mining industry are converging. And so we’ve been able to have distributed mining infrastructure with a number of energy partners and data centers to be able to bring more balance to the energy grid, partner with our energy partners, and then create more sustainable options that also help balance and decentralize the Bitcoin validation infrastructure,” he explained. 

The move reveals an interesting alignment of incentives. Paystand decided to become vertically integrated as a Bitcoin payments company, applying to supply its own hash rate, blocks, and layer two scaling solution, tailor-made for large B2B. The strategic need to guarantee transactions get confirmed by miners turned them into miners, further decentralizing the hashing power and thus the Bitcoin network. Almond added that Paystand’s expansion into mining was deeply rooted in their OG Bitcoin culture, “if we don’t have the nodes and the miners aren’t sufficiently decentralized, then again… Our view is that we are not living up to the ideals of the white paper.” 

Closing the Loop to Bitcoin Circular Economies 

Beyond its commercial operations, Paystand allocates a portion of profits to Paystand.org, a nonprofit formed in 2024, focused on supporting Bitcoin circular economies (BCEs) in the Global South. 

These BCEs are community-driven initiatives using Bitcoin for local transactions, remittances, and financial inclusion, and to drive positive social impact. BCEs include projects like Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador, Motiv in Peru, and My First Bitcoin for education. 

According to Almond, Paystand.org has donated over “a billion sats” to BCEs, equivalent to roughly one million US dollars. Donations are made as grants ranging from one thousand to eighty thousand dollars, depending on the proof of work demonstrated by the program. “We work with 30 programs all over the globe, something in the order of 20 countries,” Almond, emphasizing the scale of their non-profit work. 

Paystand dot org, alongside a variety of BCE leaders, echoes the difference Bitcoin is making in social impact projects, as this style of humanitarian work emphasizes development of agency and empowerment on the part of recipients, rather than constant handouts, fiat style, which ultimately creates dependency rather than resilience. 

Paystand demonstrated a strong presence at the recent Bitcoin Circular Economy Summit in El Salvador’s Bitcoin Beach this January 2026, where representatives shared insights on sustainable BCE models.

This post Paystand: The Payments Giants Quietly Supporting Bitcoin Circular Economies first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.