Card processors weren't built for internet-native commerce.
Stripe, PayPal, and Square are excellent rails — for American retail circa 2010. If you sell software to Indonesia, settle to a DAO treasury, or get paid in USDT by an Argentinian client, the legacy stack quietly bleeds you with fees, delays, and risk you never agreed to absorb.
The card fee tax
On a $100 invoice, Stripe takes $3.20. On a $10,000 invoice, $290. Multiply by thousands of invoices a year — you're funding a competitor's payroll. Crypto rails settle at ~1% flat, no floor, no per-transaction fixed fee.
The float game
Processors hold your money while it earns interest on their balance sheet. Rolling reserves, batch payouts, weekend delays. With stablecoins, finality is network-level — most chains confirm in under a minute, and those funds are yours.
Chargeback exposure
Even legitimate sales get reversed months after delivery. Merchants eat the fee, the product, and the dispute admin. On-chain payments have no reversal mechanism — a confirmed block is a confirmed sale.
Geographic redlining
Try onboarding as a Nigerian SaaS founder, a Vietnamese game studio, or a Pakistani freelance agency. Stripe Atlas, Payoneer, Wise — each has a disqualifying country list. Stablecoins have no passport check.
High-risk classification
Sell anything slightly non-standard — crypto, gambling, vape, consulting packages over $5K — and a processor quietly tags you high-risk. They hold 5–25% of every payment for months. We don't classify you. We route your money.
Hidden currency spread
PayPal and card networks quote interbank rates then apply a 2–4% conversion markup on top of their processing fee. USDC is already dollar-denominated. No FX. No markup. What you invoice is what lands on-chain.
One flat fee. One protocol. Everything else is physics.
We route stablecoin payments from customer to merchant on public blockchains. 1% fee is enforced on-chain by smart contract. No bank reserves, no chargeback risk, no country list. If the internet works where you are, Zateway works where you are.
One platform, every payment method
From no-code payment links to fully programmable APIs — choose how you want to get paid.
Your money never
touches our servers.
Unlike traditional payment gateways, Zateway never holds your funds. Every payment is routed by on-chain smart contract directly from your customer to your wallet. No escrow. No holding periods. No counterparty risk.
The fee delta, line by line.
Drag the slider to your monthly volume. We model Stripe's published US card rate (2.9% plus a $0.30 per-transaction fixed fee) against Zateway's 1% flat on-chain fee. Real savings compound — reinvested in engineering, not in processor margin.
- No per-transaction floorOur fee scales linearly. A $5 invoice pays 5¢, not 34¢.
- No cross-border surchargeStripe adds 1.5% for international cards. Stablecoin rails don't have a passport.
- No monthly minimumYou pay only when you process volume. Dormant months cost nothing.
- No settlement delayFunds hit your wallet on block confirmation. No 2–7 day hold for the processor's treasury desk.
Three steps. No intermediaries.
No holding periods. No delays. A direct path from your customer's wallet to yours.
Create
Generate a payment from your dashboard, API, or payment link. Set amount, token, and chain. Takes 10 seconds.
Pay
Your customer opens the checkout and pays with USDT or USDC from any wallet — MetaMask, Phantom, or WalletConnect.
Settled
Smart contract routes funds directly to your wallet. You receive 99%. Confirmed with on-chain verification. Done.
Built for how you work
Whether you're a solo freelancer or an enterprise platform, Zateway adapts to your workflow.
A payments stack that doesn't ask you to become a blockchain engineer.
Dashboards you can hand to your ops team. Webhooks you can wire into your ERP. Analytics that make revenue reviews boring — in a good way.
Every payment, every chain, one ledger.
The Zateway dashboard is the operational source of truth. Filter payments by chain, token, status, merchant, or date. Drill into any payment to see the on-chain transaction hash, block number, confirmation depth, and the webhook delivery log for that event.
- Daily volume chart
- Per-chain breakdown
- Transaction search
- Export to CSV
- Team members + roles
- Webhook inspector
Webhook payloads your auditor will love.
Every lifecycle event — created, pending, confirmed, reverted, expired, refunded — is posted to your endpoint as a signed JSON payload. Replay any event from the dashboard. Inspect delivery attempts, response bodies, and headers. Replay protection is first-class, not an afterthought.
- Idempotent by design — Same Idempotency-Key = same outcome. Retries are safe.
- 5× retry w/ backoff — 1s → 5s → 25s → 2m → 10m. Dead-letter queue after that.
- Signed payloads — HMAC-SHA256 over raw body + timestamp. Verification snippet in docs for 3 languages.
- Event replay — Trigger any past event from the dashboard to test recovery flows.
A full parallel environment. Zero real funds needed.
Every account comes with a dedicated test mode so you can exercise the checkout and webhook flow without mixing it with live traffic. Use separate zate_test_* keys, send testnet funds on Polygon Amoy, and watch sandbox-tagged sessions stay isolated from production data.
Zateway vs every other crypto gateway.
We only benchmark against the gateways merchants actually choose between — crypto-native processors. Public, published rates. Dimensions that decide whether a processor ships you revenue or bleeds it.
| DIMENSION | Zateway THIS IS US | Coinbase Commerce | BitPay | NOWPayments | CoinGate | BTCPay |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flat processing fee | 1% on-chain | 1% platform | 1% + network | 0.5% + 3rd-party swaps | 1% (0% w/ CGPay) | 0% + self-host costs |
| Settlement speed | < 4 sec on Polygon | Hours (to merchant wallet) | Hours | Hours | Hours to 1 day | Seconds (self-custody) |
| Non-custodial | Yes — smart contract | Custodial (held then released) | Custodial | Custodial (hot wallet) | Custodial | Yes — self-hosted |
| Account suspension risk | None — no account to close | Yes — Coinbase can freeze | Yes — KYC-gated | Yes — can freeze payouts | Yes — jurisdictional | None — you run the server |
| Chargeback exposure | None — on-chain final | None — on-chain | None — on-chain | None — on-chain | None — on-chain | None — on-chain |
| Chains supported | 6 (Polygon, SOL, Base, BSC, Arbitrum, OP) | Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, Base | BTC-heavy + some EVM | 80+ (quality varies) | ~20 coins | Depends on full nodes run |
| Stablecoin support | USDT + USDC native, L2-first | USDC, DAI | USDC, GUSD, BUSD (limited) | Most via routed swaps | USDT, USDC, DAI | LN + any self-run node |
| Auto-convert to fiat | No — keep crypto (v1) | Yes — via Coinbase | Yes — USD/EUR payouts | Limited (requires partner) | Yes — bank payout | No — crypto only |
| Fee enforcement | On-chain, hardcoded | Off-chain T&Cs | Off-chain T&Cs | Tiered & negotiable | Plan-based | N/A (self-hosted) |
| Setup friction | 5 min, self-serve | Coinbase account + approval | KYB approval required | Email signup | Email signup + KYB | Server, node, SSL, maintenance |
| No-code integration | Payment links + hosted checkout | Checkout + buttons | Invoices + buttons | Payment links | Checkout + POS | Hosted UI if self-deployed |
| Developer API | REST + webhooks + code samples | REST + webhooks | REST (older spec) | REST + webhooks | REST + webhooks | Greenfield BTCPay API |
| DevOps required | Zero — SaaS | Zero — SaaS | Zero — SaaS | Zero — SaaS | Zero — SaaS | High — you host everything |
| Country availability | Internet-global | Global (account approval) | ~220 regions w/ KYC | Global | Global ex-restricted | Global (self-hosted) |
One endpoint.
Ship today.
Create a payment session with one POST. We handle wallet detection, block confirmations, fee splitting, and webhook delivery.
Six chains. One API. Every confirmation block-verified.
Each chain is monitored by an independent listener with reorg protection, gap detection, and per-block depth verification. Your customer picks the network they already use — you get a unified webhook regardless.
The parts we can't afford to get wrong.
Payment infrastructure gets exactly one chance to earn your trust. Here is the full surface area we worry about — and what we've shipped against it.
HMAC-signed webhook payloads
Replay protection
Reorg detection
Double-spend protection
Rate limiting + abuse control
Encrypted API keys at rest
BigInt accounting
Network isolation + least privilege
Transparent pricing
One fee. No fine print. No surprises.
What a Zateway month actually looks like.
Three representative merchants running Zateway in production. Names changed, numbers real. If any of these shapes match yours, the onboarding flow will feel familiar within the first hour.
12-person remote design studio. Clients in 14 countries. Previously on Stripe + Wise.
“We stopped losing APAC deals at the checkout page. That alone paid for the integration in a month.”
Two-person AI content platform. Usage-based pricing, high volume of $5–$50 transactions.
“Removing the $0.30 fixed component on tiny transactions is the single biggest margin move we've made.”
E-commerce brand selling enthusiast hardware globally via API integration. Orders from 62 countries in 2025.
“The API integration took under an hour. By Tuesday we were processing USDT from customers in Lagos and Karachi.”
Shipped, shipping, and queued.
A public commit log for the product. We update this when things actually ship — not when marketing thinks they might.
Frequently asked questions
Everything you need to know about Zateway's payment rail.