How to accept crypto payments

What accepting crypto actually involves

Strip away the jargon and a crypto payment is: your customer transfers digital money from their wallet to yours, on a shared network, and you confirm it arrived. Everything else — checkout pages, invoices, receipts, record-keeping — is the same work you'd expect from any payment tool, just built for wallets instead of cards.

You can do all of it manually: post a wallet address, watch the blockchain, screenshot confirmations, email thank-yous. People do. But manual crypto payments fail quietly at scale — mismatched amounts, payments that arrive after you stopped checking, records that live in a chat thread. The rest of this guide is about doing it properly, and the steps are the same whether you use a platform or not.

Step 1: Set up a wallet you control

Your wallet is where payments land, and it's the one piece you should set up carefully. For the Ethereum-family networks (Base, Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism) the common choices are MetaMask and Coinbase Wallet; for Solana, Phantom and Solflare. Installing one takes minutes, and the address it gives you is permanent — the same address works on every Ethereum-family network.

Two rules matter more than which wallet you pick. First: whoever holds the recovery phrase holds the money — write it down, store it offline, and never share it with anyone, including any payment platform. A legitimate platform will only ever ask for your address, never your keys. Second: treat your receiving wallet with the same care as a bank login; a dedicated wallet for business payments keeps things clean and limits exposure.

You don't need to fund the wallet to receive payments — receiving costs nothing. The customer pays the transfer cost on their side.

Step 2: Choose your networks

"Which crypto" matters less than "which network" — the same USDC exists on several blockchains, and a payment stays on the network it was sent on. The networks differ mainly in transfer cost and speed: Base and Solana are typically a fraction of a cent per transfer, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism a few cents or less, and the Ethereum mainnet more, varying with activity.

The practical advice: enable the networks your customers actually hold money on. If you don't know, enable the cheap ones (Base, Solana) plus Ethereum, and see what customers choose. On Settle you add a payout wallet per network — the same address works for all the Ethereum-family ones — and every checkout lets the customer pick from what you've enabled.

One warning worth internalizing early: payments don't cross networks by themselves. USDC on Base and USDC on Ethereum are separate balances. If a customer sends on the wrong network, the money isn't lost — but it's on the wrong chain, and getting it where you wanted is a separate task. A good checkout prevents this by making the network explicit and matching transfers to the network it expected.

Step 3: Create payment links, invoices, or product pages

This is where a platform earns its keep. A payment link is a permanent checkout URL for a fixed price — share it in a message, an email, a bio. An invoice is for a specific customer and amount, with a due date and an automatic receipt. A product page adds quantity, options, and shipping. Whichever shape fits, the customer experience is the same: they open the link, see a dollar price and the exact amount to send, and pay from their wallet.

The exact-amount part is the quiet genius bit. Rather than generating a new deposit address for every customer (the old way), each checkout asks for a unique amount — your $250 invoice becomes 250.004317 USDC, say. When that exact amount arrives at your wallet, it can only belong to that invoice. One wallet address, unlimited customers, automatic reconciliation.

If you sell software rather than services, the same flow is available as an API: create the checkout from your code, redirect the customer, and receive a signed webhook when the payment verifies. But for most businesses, the no-code links and invoices are all you'll ever need.

Step 4: Get paid, verified

When a customer pays, two things need to happen before you ship: the transfer has to arrive, and it has to be verified. Arrival is the blockchain's job — typically seconds on the cheaper networks. Verification means checking the transfer on-chain: the right amount, the right token, the right network, to your wallet. A transaction ID pasted into a chat proves nothing; the transfer itself is the proof.

Insist on a platform that verifies on-chain before marking anything paid — it's the difference between a payment record and a receipt. On Settle, verification runs automatically through several independent paths (a push notification from the network, a check after the customer's wallet confirms, a periodic scan, and a background sweep), so payments register even when the customer closes the tab immediately.

After verification, the follow-up work should take care of itself: the invoice flips to paid, the customer gets a receipt by email, and the payment lands in your records with its full timeline — detected, verified, settled — alongside the transaction on a public block explorer.

Step 5: Keep records, handle the edges

Crypto payments leave the best paper trail of any payment method — every transaction is public and permanent. But a trail on the blockchain isn't the same as books you can hand an accountant. Export your transactions regularly to CSV (Settle exports everything: amounts, tokens, networks, timestamps, transaction IDs), and keep the receipt records alongside them.

The edge cases deserve a plan. A customer sends the wrong amount: the payment won't match an invoice automatically — Settle collects these in an unmatched-transfers inbox where you can review and assign them. A customer wants a refund: you send it from your wallet to their address, and record it so the books stay straight. A customer claims they paid: look for the verified record, not the claim.

Taxes and accounting rules for crypto income vary by country and are genuinely a professional question — what a platform can do is give you clean, complete records so your accountant isn't reconstructing anything. Settle's exports are built for exactly that.

With a platform vs without one

You can accept crypto with zero platform: an address, a price list, and a block explorer. For one or two payments a year, that's fine. The math changes with volume: unique amounts (or address management), verification, receipts, records, dispute threads, subscription renewals, and a checkout that doesn't confuse customers — each is small, and together they're a product.

When you compare platforms, the questions that matter are: does it hold my money (custodial vs non-custodial), does it verify payments on-chain, what does it cost, and can I leave with my records? Settle's answers are never holds funds, verifies on-chain, 0% platform fee during launch, and full CSV export — but ask any platform you evaluate the same four.