About PayNow

Early access · USDC on Base

PayNow is built by a small team with one goal: a way to be paid at a name a person can read, by a company that cannot touch the money on its way to you. It is operated by PayNow DAO LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company.

Why a domain

A wallet address is forty-two characters that mean nothing, cannot be checked by eye, and are catastrophic to mistype. Every business already owns a name its customers recognise and can spell. Using that name as the payment address removes the single most dangerous step in sending money onchain — and it removes it without asking anyone to learn a new identity system, because the domain and the DNS record behind it are things you already control.

When your customer pays yourdomain.com, we resolve that name to the wallet address you linked, and their payment goes there directly.

The constraint we started with

Before any code was written we wrote down a rule: no part of PayNow may hold, derive, or transmit a key capable of moving a merchant’s funds. Not a seed phrase, not a signing service, not a key in a vault that only fires under the right conditions. None of it.

The one key PayNow does hold pays the network fee to submit a payment your customer has already signed. It cannot originate a transfer. If it were stolen tomorrow, the thief could pay for our transactions and nothing else.

What that costs

It would be easier to build this differently, and a lot of products do. Holding funds for a moment makes refunds trivial, makes taking a fee out of the payment trivial, and makes a dozen conveniences fall out for free. We gave all of that up on purpose.

So: we cannot refund your customer for you — a refund has to be a transfer you sign from your own wallet, which we will record. We will not take our fee out of your payment. And if we disappeared, your money would be exactly where it already is, because it was never anywhere else.

Where we are

PayNow is in early access and free to use. We are onboarding a small number of merchants by hand, because the questions a first merchant asks are worth more than a signup funnel.