# PayNow — Get paid at your domain

PayNow lets you invoice in US dollars and get paid in USDC on Base, straight to a wallet you control. This is the whole setup, in the order you actually do it.

Time: About twenty minutes, most of it waiting for a DNS record.
Docs: https://blakeryan.xyz/docs/quickstart

PayNow is invoicing and checkout where a merchant's own domain name is the
payment address. Payments are USDC on the Base network. PayNow never holds
merchant funds and holds no key capable of moving them: USDC moves directly
from the customer's address to the merchant's. PayNow pays the network fee to
submit a payment the customer has already signed, which is why a customer needs
no ETH. It is free during early access and pricing has not been announced.

## Quickstart

### 1. Get a wallet

Somewhere for the money to land that belongs to you, not to us.

PayNow never holds your money, which means you need somewhere for it to go before you can be paid. That place is a wallet, and it needs to work on a network called Base. This is the only step that is genuinely new if you have not used crypto before, and it is worth ten minutes.

You have two honest options and they trade off against each other. An account at an exchange like Coinbase or Kraken is the fastest to open, works with a bank account you already have, and handles turning USDC back into dollars later. The catch is that the exchange holds the funds — you have an account with a company rather than money you hold directly.

A self-custody wallet — Coinbase Wallet, MetaMask or Rabby, all browser extensions — means you hold the funds yourself and no company can freeze them. The catch is the recovery phrase: it is the only way back in, nobody can reset it for you, and losing it means losing the money.

Note: If you are not sure, start with an exchange account. It is the lower-risk mistake: you can move to self-custody later, and you cannot un-lose a recovery phrase. Just know that choosing an exchange means choosing custody — the thing PayNow itself avoids.

Whichever you pick, you end up with a receiving address: a long string starting with 0x. That is what PayNow needs. You do not need to buy any cryptocurrency, hold any ETH, or make any transaction to start accepting payments.

WARNING: When you copy your address, check the network says Base. The same address usually exists on several networks, and USDC sent on the wrong one is the most common way people lose money in crypto. It is not recoverable and we cannot help you get it back.

### 2. Link your domain

One DNS record, so your customers pay a name instead of a string of hex.

Sign in to PayNow, go to onboarding, and enter the domain you want to be paid at along with the address from step one. PayNow shows you a DNS record to add.

Add it wherever your domain's DNS lives — GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, Vercel. Look for a section called DNS, DNS Records, or Manage DNS, add a new record of the type PayNow shows you, and paste in the name and value exactly. Save.

Note: You are adding a record, not replacing one. If your domain already serves a website or email, leave everything else alone and both keep working.

DNS changes take anywhere from a minute to an hour to become visible. Come back to PayNow and check — it looks the name up and compares what it finds to the address you gave. When they match, you are linked.

Note: There is no transaction here, no wallet connection, and no gas. Linking a domain costs nothing and touches no blockchain.

### 3. Send an invoice

Create a charge, share the link.

In the dashboard, create an invoice for an amount in dollars and give it a description your customer will recognise. PayNow gives you a link.

Send that link however you already talk to customers — email, a message, a button in your app. There is nothing to install on their end and no account for them to make.

WARNING: An invoice expires seven days after you create it, and the deadline cannot be extended. It is signed into the payment your customer approves and enforced by the USDC contract itself, so neither you nor we can move it afterwards. If one lapses, issue a new one.

### 4. Get paid

What your customer sees, and what happens after they click.

Your customer opens the link and sees your domain, the amount, and a button. If they already have a wallet, they use it. If they do not, they can create one on the page in a couple of clicks — it is made in their browser and we never see its key.

They need USDC to pay. They do not need ETH, an account with us, or any other cryptocurrency: PayNow pays the network fee to submit their payment, so the amount they hold is the amount they can spend.

When they approve, the USDC moves from their address to yours. It appears in about two seconds, and your dashboard shows which stage it is at rather than guessing: seen, then pending, then posted once it is confirmed enough to be final.

WARNING: A settled payment cannot be reversed — not by your customer, not by you, and not by us. There are no chargebacks, which is the point, but it also means a payment sent by mistake is gone. If you need to give money back, you send it from your own wallet and we record it against the invoice.

### 5. Turn USDC into dollars

Optional. Your money is already yours; this is how you spend it as cash.

USDC is a US dollar stablecoin: one USDC is designed to be worth one dollar, and PayNow records it that way. Plenty of businesses simply hold it, especially if they also pay suppliers in it.

To turn it into cash, send it from your wallet to an exchange account and withdraw dollars to your bank. If you took the exchange route in step one, it is already there and you can skip straight to the withdrawal.

PayNow is not part of this step. We do not convert, hold, or route your funds, and we do not take a cut of the conversion — there is nothing for us to take a cut of, because the money was never with us.

## Limits worth knowing

- USDC on Base only. No other asset or network is supported.
- Invoices expire seven days after creation and cannot be extended.
- Payments are final. There are no chargebacks and no refunds through PayNow;
  a refund is a transfer the merchant sends from their own wallet.
- PayNow cannot freeze, reverse, or recover a payment. Nobody can.
- There is no public API yet. Integration today is sharing a checkout link.