For Businesses

Onchain payments can make things more streamlined for businesses, especially small business or online freelancers. Modern blockchain technology allows payments to settle almost instantly, and with more security than traditional payment cards.

The Onchain Advantage

Speed

With traditional payment systems, payments can take days to settle. With modern blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, and the Bitcoin Lightning Network, payments settle quicker.

Security

When customers pay you, all they do is cryptographically sign a statement saying “I want to send X amount to some account.” No compromising information ever leaves your customer's possession when performing transactions.

Immutability

Once you receive your payment, there's nothing your customer can do to reverse it without your assistance (for example to fulfill a return policy). No more worrying about chargebacks and disputes, and the fees that can come with them.

CAUTION

This can be a HUGE risk for your customers though!

Since onchain payments cannot be disputed, it's easy for your customers to get scammed. You may want to find ways to help your customers ensure that they're paying the correct person if you're transacting wallet-to-wallet (not using a processor like Stripe or Shopify).

Global Reach

Onchain payments are accessible to anyone in the world with access to the internet. This means your online business can operate on a global scale without worrying about exchange rates or sudden bank fees.

How to accept onchain payments

Accepting onchain payments is quite simple, no matter how your business operates.

TIP

Square is auto-enabling Bitcoin Lightning payments for all merchants soon!

Square, one of the largest small business PoS systems, has said that they are going to be rolling out Bitcoin payments by default to their merchants starting at the end of March 2026.

If you're a Square merchant, your customers can pay in Bitcoin and it will settle to local currency. You can also opt to receive Bitcoin directly, or if you really wish not to participate, disable Bitcoin entirely.

See this Tweet from Square to learn more.

For large businesses / retailers

Flexa is a company that works with retailers and existing point of sale systems to integrate onchain payments. They support stablecoins and crypto on many chains. Their supported chains include Bitcoin (including Lightning), Dogecoin, Base, Celo, Ethereum, Cardano, Bitcoin Cash, Polygon, Avalanche, Solana, Litecoin, and ZCash. Flexa only charges 1% of the transaction value for their services, much cheaper than the 3% taken by traditional processors and card networks.

Flexa is also working with Burner on a device called the Flexa Terminal, which is a rebranded version of the Burner Terminal. This physical device will display a standard Flexa QR code, but it can also accept payments from Burner Card holders.

For small businesses

Small businesses with traditional POS systems could still integrate with Flexa. If you're using Square as a small business POS, you can enable Bitcoin Lightning Network payments natively on Square. If you want to accept stablecoins or if you use a different POS like Clover, you can just accept stablecoins into a personal wallet and treat those transactions as cash transactions for bookkeeping purposes. Shopify's physical POS supports stablecoins natively.

If you're not totally independent, you can use a personal wallet or a dedicated wallet to accept transactions, then send payments to employees later either onchain or by converting back to offchain dollars through exchanges and paying employees the normal way.

When the Burner Terminal comes out, it can also be used by your small business for mobile wallet and Burner card payments with stablecoins on Ethereum/EVM chains.

If you want to accept Bitcoin, a great app for you may be Numo (https://numopay.org), a point-of-sale solution based on the Cashu protocol. Numo features NFC for Cashu in addition to traditional Cashu/Lightning invoice QR codes (and BIP321 combined QR codes). If you're using a traditional Lightning wallet to hold your funds, you can have Numo automatically transfer to your wallet when a threshold of funds held by Numo is reached.

For online freelancers

Online freelancers, such as artists taking commissions, can just accept payments into their personal address just like how they would with a PayPal.me username or Cash App $Cashtag. Some wallets like the Base App and the Burner cards provide free ENS names, and Phantom has its own username system. If you wallet doesn't provide its own usernames or an ENS name, then you can buy an ENS name from https://ens.domains or https://base.org/names. When transacting online though, you can just paste the long 0x address into the chat, which works with any wallet (some nonstandard ENS names like Basenames and other subdomains won't work with many wallets).

If you want to accept Bitcoin, you can simply share a Lightning/Cashu invoice or a Lightning address with your customer.

NOTE

Having issues with an ENS name (*.eth)?

Try entering ENS names your wallet won't accept into https://ensv.littlebitstudios.com.
It should help you find and copy their address. Learn more on the Simple ENS Viewer page.