6 posts tagged with "Subscriptions"

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 — Phase 2 moves recurring billing to an on-chain SubscriptionHub. The payer signs one approve in their wallet, and anyone (including our keeper) can call charge(id) when a period is due. Funds move directly from the payer to the merchant splits — OrcaRail never holds them.

April 20, 2026 — Phase 4 brings the non-custodial model to Solana. Two Anchor programs replace the per-link HD-wallet + sweep flow: payment_link for one-off payments and subscription for SPL-delegate auto-charge. No mnemonic lives on our servers for new Solana links.

April 20, 2026 — The non-custodial roadmap we published last week describes one path: smart contracts on each chain, an OrcaRail-run keeper, an OrcaRail-run indexer, and an OrcaRail-run API. It removes custody but keeps us in the middle of almost everything else.

Several readers — rightly — asked: if the goal is to become a protocol, why stop at removing custody? What would the rail look like if OrcaRail could go dark tomorrow and payments kept flowing?

This post is a debate. Five positions argue for five different architectures. A moderator pokes at each. Nobody wins outright, but by the end we are clearer about which trade-offs we are actually making.

April 20, 2026 — Every crypto subscription product has to solve the same problem: how does a payer authorize future payments without giving up custody? There are three realistic answers. We picked allowance-pull, and this post explains why.

March 25, 2026 — OrcaRail supports recurring subscriptions in the same API-first model as one-off payments: you create a subscription, we track billing periods, and payers complete each cycle—either by opening a payment link or by auto-charge, where they authorize us to pull stablecoins each period after a one-time on-chain approval.