Terms of use

Draft · 3 September 2026 · under review

This is a working draft, published because saying nothing told you less than this does. It is under legal review and will change. Where a clause below is still open, it says so rather than guessing.

1. Who you are dealing with

PayNow is operated by PayNow DAO LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company (“PayNow”, “we”). These terms are between you and that entity. If you use PayNow to issue invoices, you are the “merchant”; if you pay one, you are the “payer”.

2. What PayNow does

PayNow gives you a hosted checkout page, a record of what you invoiced and what was paid, and a service that pays the network fee so your customer does not need to hold the network’s gas token. Payment is in USDC on Base.

Money moves directly from your customer’s wallet to yours. It does not pass through an account of ours at any point, and there is no moment at which we could direct it somewhere else.

3. What PayNow cannot do — and why that matters to you

We hold no key capable of moving your money. The one key we do hold pays the network fee to submit an authorisation your customer has already signed; it cannot start a payment, change an amount, or send funds anywhere other than where the signature already says.

This has consequences you should understand before you rely on the service:

  • A completed payment cannot be undone by us. Not as a policy — we have no mechanism. A refund can only be a payment you choose to send back from your own wallet.
  • We cannot immobilise anyone’s balance, including a payer’s and including your own.
  • We cannot recover your wallet. If you lose access to the wallet you linked, we cannot restore it, and neither can anyone else.
  • We can decline to submit a payment for you. That is the one lever we have, and section 7 sets out when we use it. It stops us relaying; it does not stop a payer who holds their own signed authorisation from submitting it themselves.

4. Your account and your wallet

You sign in with a code sent to your email; there is no password. Keep access to that mailbox — anyone who has it can reach your dashboard.

You must link a wallet you control and a domain you control. You are responsible for the accuracy of both. If you point PayNow at an address you do not control, payments will go to that address, and we cannot retrieve them.

5. Invoices are between you and your customer

PayNow is not a party to whatever you are selling. We do not verify that goods were delivered or that a service was performed, we take no position in a dispute between you and a payer, and we offer no chargeback process — there is no mechanism by which we could operate one. Disputes are yours to resolve with your customer directly.

6. What we ask of you

Do not use PayNow to:

  • take payment for anything unlawful where you or your customer are;
  • impersonate a business or a person you are not;
  • invoice under a domain to make a payer believe they are paying someone else;
  • attempt to exhaust, probe or circumvent the service’s limits, or the key that pays network fees.

Merchant names are reviewed by a person before a merchant can invoice against them, because proving control of a domain proves control of that domain and nothing else about who you are.

7. When we stop relaying

We screen the addresses involved in a payment against a public sanctions oracle and decline to submit a payment that is flagged. We also operate a stop that lets us halt submission globally, for one merchant, or for one payer address — for suspected abuse, for a security incident, or where the cost of continuing is being borne by us without limit.

Stopping submission is not a freeze. Funds already in your wallet are yours and stay reachable by you throughout; nothing we do touches them.

8. Early access, and what it costs

PayNow is in early access. It is free today. If that changes we will tell you before it applies to you, and you will be able to stop using the service instead of accepting it.

Early access also means the honest warning: this is young software handling real money. Features may change or be withdrawn, and there may be interruptions.

9. No warranty, and the limit of what we owe you

The service is provided as it is, without warranties of any kind, to the extent the law where you are allows that. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, that a name will always resolve, or that a network will confirm a transaction in any particular time.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for lost profits, lost revenue, or indirect or consequential loss. Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including for fraud.

The monetary cap in this section is still open and is one of the clauses under review. We would rather leave it blank than post a number we have not taken advice on.

10. Ending it

You can stop using PayNow whenever you like. Your ledger history stays in our records — see Privacy for why some of it cannot be deleted — and your funds are unaffected, because they were never with us.

We may suspend an account that breaches section 6. Where we can give notice first, we will.

11. Changes

We will post a new date at the top when these change. For a change that materially affects a merchant, we will tell you rather than relying on you noticing.

12. Governing law

PayNow DAO LLC is formed in Wyoming, and these terms are provisionally governed by Wyoming law.

Provisional. Governing law and venue are among the questions under review, and this clause is the one most likely to change.

13. Contact

Questions about these terms: support@paynow.com. The FAQ answers the common ones faster.