Payzum Blog

Crypto Payments Blog

Non-custodial, crypto-only payments — explained for the operators and developers who actually run the money. Pain, mechanics, and how Payzum solves it.

Stablecoins

Solana stablecoin payments just hit record scale — what merchants should take from it

In one week Solana became a proven retail-scale payment rail. SIMD-0286 activated on July 29, 2026, raising the per-block compute ceiling 66% while keeping 400-millisecond blocks; on August 4 the network cleared a record 169.9 million non-vote transactions, and weekly throughput passed one billion for the first time. The same day, Western Union launched Stablecard with Rain — a Visa card and wallet holding USDPT, a dollar stablecoin issued by Anchorage Digital Bank on Solana, live in 37 markets. Read together, those two events point in opposite directions: the chain got faster and cheaper for direct payments, while the highest-profile product built on it routes the stablecoin straight back through Visa. Analysis of what actually changed for merchants, why the card leg reinstates the exact costs stablecoins remove, and how to accept USDC and USDT on Solana non-custodially today.

16 min read
Esports & Tournaments

Crypto Payments for Esports Tournaments: Pay Prizes Fast

A tournament is two payment problems pointing in opposite directions: hundreds of small entry fees coming in, and a prize table going out to players in a dozen countries who are still waiting six weeks later. Entry links and hosted checkout for registrations, expiring invoices for sponsors and team slots, POS QR at the LAN, and the whole prize table paid in one stablecoin batch — non-custodial, to a wallet your org controls.

21 min read
Stablecoins

Circle Arc mainnet lands September 16 — what it changes for stablecoin payments

On August 5, 2026, Circle named the founding validator cohort for Arc — BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, Global Payments, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo and Visa — and confirmed a public mainnet launch on September 16, 2026. Arc is a Layer 1 that uses USDC as its native gas asset, with sub-second finality, opt-in privacy and an explicit mandate for tokenized assets and agentic economic activity. It is the clearest signal yet that the settlement layer of traditional finance is moving onchain around USDC. It is also not a checkout rail: on day one your customers still hold stablecoins on Base, Solana, Polygon and Arbitrum. Analysis of what the validator cohort actually means, why chain choice is the wrong thing to optimize for, and how to accept USDC and USDT non-custodially today without betting on any single network.

14 min read
E-commerce

Shopify USDC payments reached Arbitrum — now read the fine print

On July 30, 2026, Shopify Payments added Arbitrum to its USDC checkout, bringing it to five EVM networks alongside Base, Ethereum, Optimism and Polygon. Buyers pay from 480 wallets with no FX or gas fees, and merchants choose local-currency or USDC payouts. It is the clearest sign yet that stablecoin acceptance is becoming a native checkout feature rather than a crypto plugin. But Shopify's own documentation draws the boundary: USDC only, no subscriptions, no partial capture, no post-purchase upsells, and eligibility limited to certain regions. Analysis of what the expansion validates, what it excludes, and what merchants outside the box can do today.

17 min read
Telehealth

Crypto payments for telehealth — the consult ends, the dispute window shouldn't

A remote consult is the most disputable transaction in healthcare: no premises, no signature, no delivery proof, and a defense that asks you to hand clinical detail to a card network. Hosted checkout and payment links per consult, invoices with expiration for treatment plans, recurring billing for care memberships, and same-day stablecoin payouts to a clinician panel spread across a dozen countries — settled non-custodially to a wallet your practice controls, with optional auto-convert to USDC or USDT.

21 min read
Non-custodial

A crypto payment provider shut down overnight — and the architecture decided who lost money

On July 29, 2026, Paris-based stablecoin card issuer Kulipa stopped operating over solvency problems. Around 120,000 cards died mid-checkout across roughly 20 client platforms, four months after a $6.2M seed round. No wind-down email, no grace period. And yet not a single user balance was lost — because the cards spent straight from self-custodied wallets, so there was no pooled float to freeze. Analysis of what a crypto payment provider shutdown actually costs, and why custody is the only question that changes the answer for a merchant.

15 min read
Subscriptions & Memberships

Crypto Subscriptions Without Chargebacks: Keep Your MRR

Recurring revenue on cards dies two ways: a subscriber disputes four months of renewals at once, or the credential quietly decays — expired, reissued, declined abroad — and churns a paying customer nobody meant to lose. Crypto subscriptions invert both failure modes: each renewal is final the moment it confirms on-chain, there is no card to expire, and the money settles non-custodially to a wallet you control while signed webhooks keep access in sync.

20 min read
Regulation & Analysis

Argentina's banks are building peso stablecoins — for treasuries, not for your counter

On July 28, 2026 local reporting confirmed that two of Argentina's largest banking groups are advancing peso-backed stablecoins: BIND Group through its VASP subsidiary BEN, and Petersen Group through DIPE, which already has a published whitepaper. Two weeks earlier, Circle had opened institutional USDC access through BIND. Both moves are real, and both are explicitly institutional — programmable payment conditions, collateral management, treasury settlement. Neither is a checkout product. Analysis of what Argentina peso stablecoins change, what they don't, and why a shop, clinic or agency that wants to get paid in digital dollars doesn't have to wait for a bank at all.

16 min read