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.

Agentic payments

Agentic commerce chargeback liability: who pays when an AI agent buys wrong

Agentic commerce got its own standards effort for one reason: nobody can prove what an AI agent did. On July 13, 2026, A-Comm Technologies — founded by former Visa payments leaders — opened public comment through August 14 on the A-Comm Evidence Protocol, an open-source standard for tamper-evident records of agent transactions, built around observability, traceability and auditability. It exists because card dispute rules assume a human buyer, and agent-initiated purchases break that assumption: the usual chargeback evidence (IP, device fingerprint, navigation path, time on site) is now generated by software. Regulators are not waiting — the UK's CMA told businesses in March 2026 that if an AI agent you use does something illegal, you are responsible. This is an analysis of where liability actually lands today, why bolt-on evidence layers are needed on reversible rails, and why an agent paying USDC on Base over x402 settles the question differently: the payment is final, non-custodial, and already leaves a receipt anyone can verify.

16 min read
Churches & Nonprofits

Crypto Donations for Churches and Nonprofits: How to Start

A nonprofit's money runs in two directions and both leak. Gifts come in through a donation form that pays a percentage plus a fixed fee on every $20, gets probed by card testers, and can be charged back months later. Funds go out to a field office, a local partner or a missionary through a wire that costs more than a week's budget and clears in three days. Give buttons and QR codes on the inbound side, one stablecoin batch on the outbound side, and every dollar settling to a wallet your board controls.

22 min read
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.

15 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.

18 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