Stablecoin payments let a business get paid in a token that tracks a regular currency, usually the US dollar. Customers pay from a crypto wallet or an exchange account, and the business receives a dollar-denominated balance instead of a volatile coin.

This guide is for businesses, not traders. It covers what a stablecoin is, when stablecoin payments make sense, how they compare with cards, the risks to plan for, and the steps to start accepting them with OrcaRail.

A USDT payment gateway lets customers pay you in Tether (USDT), the most widely held stablecoin. One USDT is meant to track one US dollar, so you get the reach of crypto without pricing your products in a volatile coin.

The catch is that USDT lives on many blockchains. "Send USDT" can mean Ethereum (ERC20), Solana, BNB Chain, Tron (TRC20), or a dozen layer-2 chains. This guide explains which networks matter, what can go wrong, and how to accept USDT on your website with OrcaRail.

An altcoin payment gateway lets your customers pay with coins other than Bitcoin: ETH, SOL, POL, AVAX, ARB, and long-tail tokens. The hard part isn't taking those coins. It's not ending up with a wallet full of volatile tokens on 20 different chains.

This guide explains how altcoin payments work, what to check before you choose a provider, and how OrcaRail lets customers pay in almost any token while you receive the stablecoin and network you chose.

Recurring crypto payments let a customer pay a subscription in USDC, USDT, or another token every week, month, or year. The problem: crypto has no "card on file". A wallet never hands its keys to a merchant, so you can't just charge it again next month.

This guide explains the three ways to bill crypto subscriptions, what each one costs you and your customer, and how to set them up with OrcaRail.

This is a list of the main crypto payment gateways in 2026, compared on what matters when you integrate one: fees, recurring billing, custody, and stablecoin support.

Disclosure: OrcaRail publishes this blog and is one of the gateways listed. Every competitor figure below comes from the provider's own pricing page or documentation, checked on 13 October 2026, with a link to the source. Pricing changes, so confirm with the provider before you decide.

An OrcaRail sandbox organization runs on testnets only, so you pay with free test tokens instead of real funds. This page lists a faucet for every testnet the sandbox supports.

July 31, 2026 — OrcaRail's developer packages are now open source under the MIT license. You can use them freely, open issues when something breaks or is missing, and contribute improvements when you can.

April 20, 2026 — Today we are publishing the full roadmap for moving OrcaRail from its current custodial sweep model (we generate a deposit address per payment link, then sweep and split funds) to a non-custodial smart-contract model (funds land in a per-link contract that splits and settles atomically, and subscriptions pull from a payer-controlled allowance).

This post is the index. Each phase has its own deep-dive post and a living docs page, so you can deep-link to exactly the part you care about.

April 20, 2026 — This is the OrcaRail Protocol whitepaper. It is the canonical statement of what OrcaRail is becoming: an open, credibly neutral, non-custodial, non-stop payment rail that a Web2 merchant can integrate using familiar HTTP APIs and webhooks, and a Web3 payer can use with any wallet — and that keeps settling even if OrcaRail, the company, disappears.

It extends — it does not replace — the non-custodial roadmap and the protocol debate. The non-custodial roadmap (Track N, Phases 0-7) removes custody. This whitepaper adds a parallel Track P that decentralizes the rest: indexers, frontends, standards, keepers, and governance.

April 20, 2026 — Before we write a line of Solidity, we freeze the spec. Phase 0 is the design and sign-off phase of the non-custodial roadmap: what moves on-chain, what does not, which chain ships first, who audits the contracts, and who holds the deployer keys.