CoinGate

Paying someone in crypto usually starts with a small interrogation. What is your wallet address? Which network? Are you sure that is right?

With Payout Links, you skip all of it. Creating one takes about a minute.

Set the amount and the currency the recipient will see. Write a purpose line, something like "Q1 affiliate payout", so the person opening the link knows the payment is legitimate and expected. Pick an expiry. Then share the URL yourself, or let us email it to them.

The recipient chooses their own crypto, their own network, their own wallet. The display amount can say EUR 250 while your balance funds it in stablecoins. Conversion happens at claim time.

One thing surprises people at first: your balance is debited the moment the link goes live. It is a hold, not a charge. Expired, canceled, or failed links refund you in full, fee included. You always know the maximum a link can cost, because it is fixed at creation.

On top of that, if your account requires dashboard approval for payouts, links start as drafts until someone confirms them with two-factor authentication. Useful when more than one person can move money.

The step-by-step walkthrough: https://coingate.com/blog/post/how-to-create-a-payout-link

How to Create a Payout Link on CoinGate (Step by Step) You have someone to pay and no wallet address for them. Here is how to create a Payout Link, share it, track it, and cancel one if you need to.

Payout Links are live, and they need one thing about the person you are paying: their email address.

Every crypto payout starts with a data-collection exercise. You need the recipient's wallet address, the network it belongs to, their country, their date of birth. You ask, they answer, you store it, and when they change wallets you do it again.

They supply the rest themselves. They pick the crypto and the network, paste their own wallet address, and enter the details a regulated payout has to carry, on a page we host with no account to create. You never have to ask for any of it, and you never have to store it.

The design detail we care about most sits underneath. Your funds are reserved the moment the link is created, and that reservation is the most the link can ever cost you. If it expires, if you cancel it, or if a compliance check stops the payment, everything comes back to you, fees included. You only pay when a payout actually completes.

Compliance runs inside the collect flow. The wallet address is validated against the network and screened, the details the recipient entered are screened too, and nothing moves on-chain until both pass. None of it becomes your engineering problem.

Payout Links earn their place in affiliate payouts, contractor payments, paying a customer back, rewards and bounties. Anywhere the list of people you pay changes faster than you want to keep records for them.

"Your business has been classified as high risk."

If a processor has ever sent you that sentence, you know what follows. A higher rate, a rolling reserve, and a document list that keeps growing.

Here is the part worth understanding before you go shopping for a crypto alternative. The high risk label is mostly a card problem wearing a compliance costume.

Three of the things it prices for belong to cards specifically. Chargebacks, which do not exist on a blockchain payment. Issuer declines, which need an issuing bank to decline. And the rolling reserve, which exists to fund an exposure that crypto settlement does not create in the first place. A reserve behaves like an interest free loan you were required to make, and it hurts most at the beginning and at the exit.

So a card acquirer's no does not automatically follow you here. If the decline was driven by dispute rates, that is an exposure we do not carry. If it was driven by the nature of your business, your licensing or your ownership structure, it applies to us too.

Because the compliance half is real and it is not going anywhere. KYB, AML screening, sanctions monitoring and MiCA obligations all stay. Administrator and Accountant roles complete personal verification through Onfido, including a live ID check. Enhanced due diligence triggers on ownership structures more than three layers deep, high risk jurisdictions and politically exposed persons. Prohibited categories sit in clause 12 of our general terms, in public, where you can read them before you apply.

On pricing, our Standard plan is 1% per transaction with no monthly fee and no setup fee, settled weekly. Refunds cost 0.25 EUR plus 0.1%, and that 0.1% only applies when the refunded currency differs from the one used to issue it.
If what you wanted was a processor that asks fewer questions, this is the wrong page. If what you wanted was one that prices you for the risk you actually carry, the full breakdown is below.

We published our first Squaretalk case study a year ago. Back then, crypto payments were the interesting experiment in their payment mix.

This month we checked in again, and the word "experiment" has quietly left the vocabulary.

What changed in between was regulation. In December 2025 we became the first homegrown Lithuanian company to receive a MiCA license from the Bank of Lithuania, covering the entire EEA. For Squaretalk, that moved crypto from a payment option their legal team tolerated to one it can document and defend.

Isaac Levi, their Head of Partnerships and Business Development, put it better than we could: "Working with a MiCA-licensed crypto payment provider is a critical requirement for us. In practice, this means stronger confidence around KYC/AML procedures, transaction traceability, audit readiness, and operational standards."

The operational side tells the same story. The clear majority of their crypto volume is stablecoins, year after year. The processing runs, in Isaac's words, for the most part fully automated.

And their advice for companies still weighing crypto? "Focus on the operational benefits rather than the hype."

We will take that as a compliment. Hype was never really our thing.

An invoice is a strange document. It represents money that is yours and also nowhere near you.

For businesses billing internationally, the gap between invoice sent and money received is where the damage happens. Wire fees on both ends. Amounts that arrive lighter than they left. Card payments that fail with no explanation because a bank somewhere did not like the country code.

Crypto invoicing shrinks that gap to minutes, weekends included. One property does the heavy lifting: crypto payments are push, not pull. The client sends the money from their own wallet, so there is no card to decline and no processor in the middle guessing about fraud.

The flow stays short. Create the bill, send it as a link or email, and the client pays from any wallet in a few clicks. They do not need a CoinGate account. You settle in crypto, stablecoins, or EUR, GBP, and USD, and every payment carries a transaction hash, a timestamp, and an amount for your records.

For agencies and SaaS teams billing the same clients monthly, scheduled invoices repeat the whole thing automatically.

Here is something a crypto payments company probably should not lead with: you cannot auto-charge a crypto wallet.

Funds only move when the wallet owner signs the transaction. There is no stored card to pull from, no mandate to invoke. Anyone selling you crypto subscriptions that work exactly like card billing is describing something that does not exist.

So how do agencies on retainer or hosting companies actually bill clients in crypto every month?

They automate the request, not the charge. The invoice recurs on schedule, lands in the client's inbox with a payment link, and paying it takes the client under a minute. One click, one signature, done until next month.

However, the limitation carries a quiet benefit. There are no stored payment credentials to breach, and no zombie subscription keeps billing a card nobody checks. Every month, your client actively decides you are worth paying. Uncomfortable? A little. Honest? Completely.

On our side this runs through Billing: reusable itemized bills, saved contacts, settlement in crypto, stablecoins, or EUR, GBP, and USD. The client needs no CoinGate account to pay.

Tired of rebuilding the same invoice every month? Start with us.

Plenty of businesses stay with a crypto payment provider they have outgrown. Not because it serves them well, but because switching feels like open-heart surgery on their checkout.

It does not have to be. The migration playbook is boring, and boring is exactly the point.

Open and verify the new account first. Verification is the step with lead time, so start it before anything else. Integrate in sandbox while your current provider keeps running. Match your settlement and payout settings so finance does not get surprised by a different currency mix. Run both in parallel with a small share of real traffic. Then switch. Customers never notice, because there was never a moment without a working checkout.

Two gotchas worth knowing. Refunds are issued from the provider that took the original payment, so keep the old account alive until in-flight orders age out. And remap your webhooks before the cutover, not after.

When is switching actually worth it? Cost at scale, a missing capability like fiat settlement or mass payouts, or a provider that still has no EU license. That last one stopped being a preference and became a requirement under MiCA.

Proof of reserves is a snapshot, not a film.

It shows what a provider held at one moment in time. It usually says little about liabilities, and nothing about what happens the day after the snapshot was taken. However, it became the industry's favorite trust signal because it is easy to publish and easy to share.

Here is the distinction that matters more: proof of reserves is something a firm chooses to do. Regulation is something it is held to.

Between the moment your customer pays and the moment funds settle to your bank account, the money sits with your provider. For that window, a voluntary snapshot is a weaker guarantee than a license with safeguarding obligations that a regulator actually enforces.

Our list of what to ask any crypto payment provider before trusting them with that window:

Who licenses you, and can I verify it? How are client funds held and segregated? What compliance runs on each transaction? What records do I get? What happens if you fail?

We answer all five for CoinGate in the article, license codes included, because verifiable beats impressive. Bank of Lithuania, LB002323 and LB002324, if you want to check right now.

Can you pay salaries in crypto? Yes. Should you? That depends entirely on who you're paying, and anyone who answers without asking is selling something.

Here's the honest split, from our guide on the topic.

𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝘁 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹: international contractors and remote team members. A stablecoin transfer settles in minutes, on weekends, on holidays, with no intermediary banks taking a slice on the way. A wallet address works the same in Berlin or Buenos Aires. For a designer in Argentina or a developer in Nigeria, USDC often beats the local wire experience by a distance.

𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝘁𝘄𝗶𝗰𝗲: domestic payroll. Crypto pay is still a taxable event valued in local currency at the moment of payment, so withholding, social contributions, and reporting don't go anywhere. Some jurisdictions require base wages in national currency, full stop. And volatile assets have no place in salaries... nobody wants their pay to drop 8% between Monday and Friday, which is why this conversation is about stablecoins or nothing.

One more rule we'd insist on: workers opt in. A payment method change is a conversation, not an announcement.

The pattern that works in practice: international contractors in stablecoins, domestic salaries on traditional rails. Batch the whole run through CSV or API, with a second reviewer approving before anything moves.

Full guide, including the tax and consent details most posts skip.

Marketplace teams spend months optimizing checkout. Then payout day arrives, and the real problem introduces itself.

Picture the money-out side: 200 sellers in 40 countries. By bank transfer, that's fees on every leg, currency conversions you don't control, and settlement measured in days. Sellers in some markets wait longer than others, and they notice.

The crypto version of this is refreshingly boring. Buyer payments collect centrally and confirm in minutes, with no chargebacks. You hold the balance in a stable form. On payout day, one CSV upload or one API call pays the entire seller base in a single batch, each seller receiving a fixed fiat value in the asset they need. Conversion happens on the fly, and sellers need a wallet address, not an onboarding process with your payment provider.

One honest boundary, because it matters when you're architecting this: we don't split a buyer's payment between sellers automatically. Your platform's ledger decides who earned what. We handle the collection, the mass payout, and the records that keep the two sides reconciled.

If you run a marketplace, a platform, or anything with a “many people to pay” problem, the full breakdown is worth your time.

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