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Product
Anyone building payment products has lived this story — you start building, and suddenly you’re juggling SDKs, RPCs, bridges and DEXs just to enable basic flows. You turn to aggregators who aggregate each other, but fundamentally spending months rebuilding the same fragmented infrastructure stack, time goes on commodity plumbing work.
Today, every mention of stablecoin payments will hammer in the fact that you pay less fees than traditional payments, while true, it completely misses the most important point in all of this — which is MEV. Every PSP processing blockchain payments is generating MEV value in the market, yet captures none of it. This isn’t just lost profit — it’s an opportunity to fundamentally transform payment economics from the traditional lens of cost centers into revenue generators, simply by processing payments more intelligently with a payment specific order flow. Imagine earning revenue for processing payment volume.
Despite stablecoins being labeled the “product/market fit of blockchain”, the core problem is most of the existing infrastructure was never designed for payments. It’s built as a general-purpose infrastructure, optimized for DeFi use cases like swapping and lending. The trade-offs baked into existing protocols dictate what they’re good at — and payments wasn’t the priority in order to accommodate for wider cases. This leaves payment teams building around those limitations and leaving true potential lost in the fragmentation of tools. One such approach leads to a common solution that involves custodial deposit accounts. Sure, it works, but now you’re firmly in VASP territory, expanding your regulatory and security scope dramatically. Another compromise is treating all payments the same way a swap transaction is treated, leaving even the most common payment optimizations out of scope. Many teams are forced into this compromise simply because better, payment specific sequencing infrastructure doesn’t exist.
That’s why we built the Chain Abstracted Payment API. It lets developers build full payment workflows across any network and currency, with full self-custody managed through delegated permissions. When approaching payments with first-principles, and applying domain-specific sequencing the benefits go deeper than you might expect:
Single API integration gives you immediate access to all supported networks and currencies behind single-step payments, meeting users at their point of liquidity. There are more benefits to this than just better UX, including capturing your own MEV instead of losing it out to 3rd parties, but more on that later.
Programmable and built-in Payment Clearing Engine with context-aware solver executions.
Wallet-agnostic. All it takes is a signed payment intent and you can do that from your deposit accounts, users bringing their own self-custodial wallet, or smart contract wallets and embedded wallets.
Full gas fee abstraction. Supporting EIP2612 and our custom payment intent design allows users to pay without having native gas tokens, and to cover gas fees in an ERC20 such as the same payment asset (eg USDC).
How does it really work?
Paygrid leverages programmatic payment intents, solver coordination and consists of interconnected off-chain and on-chain components to securely orchestrate payment workflows across chains.
Every payment intent goes through 4 main steps:
Corridors Routing & Price Discovery (Optional): This solution allows developers to fetch in real-time all possible cross-chain payment routes, their fees and estimated execution time. It only requires a source wallet address and destination network(s) and/or token(s). It handles payer balance checks and calculates all network and processing fees under a single corridor fee. This fee is useful later to configure a charge bearer setting to determine which party will cover the fees. All returned corridor quotes are guaranteed executable. This step can be skipped if the payment intent corridor is already known and price information is not necessary.
Payment Intent Authorization: Before initiating a payment intent, the PSP operator need to capture from payer accounts the necessary authorizations or permissions required to orchestrate the payment workflow, resource locking and fund transfers.
Payment Intent Creation and Initiation: The operator (or an authorized delegate) signs and initiates the payment intent by submitting a request to the Paygrid Clearing Gateway.
Payment Status Tracking (IPNs): Monitor payment progress through detailed status updates for easier reconciliation and debugging.
Check out the docs for more information.
Introducing Payment Corridors — The missing data link
Payment corridors are a standard old concept in traditional payments and blockchain payments also have corridors. Paygrid introduces a missing link in how we think and talk about payments with the concept of corridors. We define a corridor as a predefined route or pathway used to transfer assets from a source network and token to a destination network and token. Each corridor is characterized by specific attributes such as different costs, speed, and type (e.g., same chain or cross chain). These corridors are used to determine the most efficient and cost-effective way to transfer assets across different blockchain networks.
Furthermore, adding the payment context to it such as a B2B payment that prioritizes cost over speed, a payment corridor provides a rich data set of requirements, an example of that is:
Source Network: Ethereum
Source Token: USDT
Destination Network: Base
Destination Token: USDC
Priority: Cost
Amount: $100,000
The Corridor Pricing API responds with a total corridor fee and expected execution speed for that particular combination. This is different than RFQs, where you request a quote from each bridge or DEX, wait for responses and simply pick the cheapest or fastest, this a dynamic pricing engine based on all available data that we continuously maintain and improve on from our solver executions.
The difference between RFQ and Pricing is like placing a ride on Uber, RFQ model would be Uber going to ask each available driver for their price and time for the trip, and then showing you a price and time based on that, versus Uber dynamically pricing the trip upfront with their pricing engine and using its marketplace dynamics to secure a suitable match.
We believe payment corridors are an essential concept in blockchain payments that needs to be cultivated as it can inform the entire market with data rich information for payment movements, allowing solvers and LPs to better position their liquidity, and allows Paygrid to improve on execution down to a specific corridor as needed. The more data we have → the more informed the market → the better the executions become. This can better handle extreme events, whether predictable like Black Friday sales or unforeseen black swan events, such as sudden market movements. We look forward to sharing this data back with our partners to improve overall market dynamics.
Finally the corridor fee is a simple way to think about all the costs involved to make this execution happen. It encompasses all the gas fees, liquidity provision fees, and and any other fee required to make this execution happen across any number of steps or networks. And we allow developers to control how this fee is paid with the charge bearer setting, completing our gas abstraction benefits. For example you could set a corridor fee to be split:
Payer covers their source network fees
Payee covers their destination network fees
Other models exist allowing PSPs to sponsor the fees, or set the payer or payee as full charge bearers as well. Compare this with today’s generalized infrastructure:
We look forward to a future where payment apps in LatAm leveraging networks like Celo, are interacting with networks built in another side of the world like Tron or even Bitcoin, getting us closer to the true promise of borderless payments that was lost in all this fragmentation.
Beyond Infrastructure: Why Context Matters with Payment Clearing Benefits
The real insight came when we looked at how payments actually work in practice from our past experience. They’re not just transactions — they’re workflows with context. A $100k B2B payment isn’t just a bigger version of a $1 micropayment — it has fundamentally different requirements, risks, and optimization opportunities.
This led us to build something unique: context-aware clearing protocol that adapt to each payment’s needs. Instead of treating every transaction the same way, we let developers control how their volume executes, unlocking new dimensions of cost savings and MEV value capture:
Retail payment of $100 (Low value, high frequency): For an ecommerce or offline store scenario, you could prioritize speed of execution in order to release some goods to the buyer in a DvP flow.
B2B payment of $100,000 (High value, low frequency): For a business, applying specialized clearing mechanisms can reduce overall execution cost, and capture MEV revenue back to you as a developer facilitating this workflow.
AI Agents <0.1 to $5 (Micro transactions): Instead of settling each payment as it goes immediately incurring costs each time, applying another strategy for clearing mechanism can again reduce overall execution cost, and simply net them at the end of a pre-defined netting cycle.
In our initial tests, this payment specific and context aware approach showed significant efficiency improvements, with potential to actually generate MEV revenue for payment teams for simply processing payments. These mechanisms and context provide a rich private order flow for solvers to perform various clearing mechanisms, find CoWs and expand on the efficiency far beyond generalized intents.
Get started with Paygrid APIs
We’ve designed our integration process to be as simple as possible:
Review our documentation.
Get your API key.
Build your workflows.
We’re available in direct Slack / Groups to help overcome any challenges and get the most out of it.
Our initial launch supports 5 EVMs + Solana, 3 main stablecoins, and we’re rapidly expanding to support more networks and capabilities. In the meantime, you can play with our demo app.
If you’re building payment infrastructure and tired of rebuilding the same stack for every network, or curious about how intelligent clearing could transform your payment economics, let’s explore how we can create value together.
Request access to our closed beta or reach out directly by email or Telegram.
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