Questions, answered plainly.

Invoicing and checkout where your own domain name is the payment address. You send a link, your customer pays it, and USDC arrives in your wallet.

Nothing while we are in early access. We have not announced pricing yet, and we will say so plainly here before that changes.

USDC on Base, and nothing else today. Adding an asset is a decision with real consequences for how payments settle and how revenue is recorded, so it is not something we will do quietly.

About two seconds to appear, and a short confirmation window after that before we mark it final. Your dashboard shows which stage a payment is in rather than guessing on your behalf.

A card processor typically charges around 2.9% plus 30¢ per transaction, and adds chargeback fees and monthly service charges on top of that.

PayNow is free during early access, and we have not announced what it will cost afterwards. What we can tell you is what the network costs: a payment on Base settles for a fraction of a cent in network fees, and your customer does not pay that — our relayer covers it so they never need to hold the network's gas token.

A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency designed to hold a steady value by being pegged to a reserve asset — for USDC, the US dollar. Circle, its issuer, states that it is backed one-for-one by dollar reserves and publishes regular attestations.

We chose USDC because it is the most widely held dollar stablecoin on Base, it is issued by a regulated US company, and its transfer standard lets your customer pay without holding any other cryptocurrency.

It can. USDC is designed to hold a dollar and in ordinary conditions it does, but that is a design goal rather than a guarantee, and we would rather you hear it from us than discover it.

In March 2023, USDC briefly traded near $0.88 after some of its reserves were held at a bank that failed. It recovered within days. That has happened once at that scale, but it can happen again — USDC is issued by Circle, not by us, and neither of us can promise a price.

What this means for your books: PayNow records one USDC as one dollar at the moment a payment settles, and never revalues it afterwards. Your January revenue does not change when you reload the page.

Base offers the balance this product needs: fast settlement, very low fees, and enough adoption that your customers can actually get USDC there.

It is a layer-2 network built on Ethereum and backed by Coinbase, so transactions inherit Ethereum's security while costing a fraction of a cent instead of dollars. For payments that is the difference between the model working and not working.

Yes, through a cryptocurrency exchange or another off-ramp — Coinbase and Kraken both do this, among others. You move USDC from your wallet to the exchange and withdraw dollars to your bank.

PayNow does not do this step and is not involved in it. We do not convert your funds, hold them while you decide, or take a position on how much you should convert. That is a consequence of never holding your money, not a feature we left out.

No. USDC moves directly from your customer's address to yours. It does not pass through an account of ours — not overnight, not for a block, not inside the same transaction.

PayNow holds one key. It pays the network fee to submit a payment your customer has already signed, which is why your customer never needs to hold the network's gas token.

It cannot originate a transfer. It cannot move your funds, or your customer's, under any circumstance. That is a property of how the payment is signed, not a policy we promise to follow.

Nothing. It is already in a wallet you control, and it never was anywhere else. You would lose the invoicing and the record-keeping, not the funds.

Not from inside PayNow, and this is a direct consequence of the design. A refund has to be a transfer you sign from your own wallet, which we can then record against the original invoice.

The same property that stops us moving your money to a customer is the one that stops anyone else moving it either.

There are none. A settled payment is final, so there is no float to hold in reserve and no balance to freeze while a dispute is reviewed.

The other side of that is worth saying plainly: because a payment cannot be reversed, neither you nor we can undo one that was sent by mistake. Card networks trade cost and delay for that safety net. This does not have it.

The parts that matter are not secured by us promising to be careful — they are secured by not being ours to get wrong.

Your domain is linked to your wallet address through DNS, using records only you can set at your registrar. Your customer's payment is authorised by a signature their own wallet produces, which the USDC contract verifies independently before moving anything. We hold no key that can move funds.

The honest limit: PayNow builds the payment request your customer signs, including the destination address. A compromised PayNow, or a compromised DNS record at your registrar, could present a customer with the wrong destination. Their wallet shows them that address before they approve it, which is the check that catches it — but we would rather name the weak point than let you discover it.

We are not a bank, we are not a licensed money transmitter, and USDC held in your wallet is not a deposit and is not insured by the FDIC or any government agency.

PayNow is built so that your funds never reach us: USDC moves from your customer's address to yours, and we hold no key that could move it. We screen payer addresses against sanctions designations before submitting a payment, and we refuse ones that are flagged.

We are working with outside counsel on the formal position and on our terms of service, and we would rather publish those when they are right than claim a regulatory status we have not confirmed. If precise answers here matter to your business, ask us before you rely on it.

They need USDC. They do not need to hold the network's gas token, install a wallet extension, or create an account with us.

They can create one on the payment page. It is generated in their browser, the key never leaves it, and we show them how to save it. It is meant for a single invoice.

Your domain, the amount, and a button. Their wallet shows them the destination address before they sign anything, so they can check where the money is going without taking our word for it.

A domain you control and a wallet address you control. You add a DNS record, we resolve the name and check it matches the address you gave us, and you can invoice.

No. You add one record at whatever registrar you already use. Your site, your email, and everything else about the domain keep working exactly as they do now.

No. Linking a domain is a DNS change and a name lookup. There is no transaction, no wallet connection and no gas.