Crypto payroll means paying your team in cryptocurrency, and in practice that almost always means stablecoin payroll: paying in a price-stable digital dollar such as USDC or USDT rather than a volatile coin. For companies with international contractors, it replaces slow, expensive wires with on-chain payments that settle in seconds, any day of the week, from a single balance.
The catch is the operations around it. Run payouts manually from wallets and spreadsheets and finance becomes the help desk: people get paid late, proof of payment is scattered, and there is no clean approval history or audit trail. The goal is payroll that pays and records in the same step.