Just a note here.
A few years ago, when I onboarded a few dozen of merchants to support Zcash in Greece, I asked them what was the main reason for not supporting crypto payments earlier. Their answer was that nobody wanted to spend crypto for buying stuff. This is not a chicken and egg problem. Users had and (now more than ever) have the ability to easily spend their crypto. But they won’t spend it because they would rather hold and sell when the price goes sky high. I’m not going to start a debate here about the merits of holding vs spending but if you ask any merchant, they will tell you the same thing. The biggest obstacle for adoption is the lack of users willing to spend, not merchants accepting crypto. For the merchants, the easiest part is to accept Zcash. They just download a wallet and that’s it. Or they can use a service like Coinpayments. The merchants don’t have any trouble accepting Zcash (and they don’t particularly care about shielded, but this is a separate discussion). 95% of the Greek merchants I spoke with, just used a mobile wallet and were not particularly interested in spending their crypto either at the time. They saw it as an alternative and extra income that they would rather invest (AKA hold) than convert to fiat. From the users’ POV, I can understand them too. For many jurisdictions, spending crypto triggers a taxable event. So why on earth would anybody want to spend their crypto on a regular basis and then have Uncle Sam up their ***. And it’s not just the taxable event but also the headache of accounting. So I would say the issue is a mix of regulation and collective consciousness on what crypto is and how it can be used.