How Do Crypto Payments Work? A Plain-English Guide for Businesses

Crypto payments sound complicated and are mostly not. Stripped of jargon, a stablecoin payment is a customer moving digital dollars from their account to yours over a shared ledger, in about a second, for a fraction of a cent. This guide explains what actually happens, in order, and how it differs from the card payment you already understand.

What is a crypto payment, really?

A crypto payment is a transfer of value recorded on a blockchain — a shared, tamper-evident ledger that many computers agree on. For payments, the value being moved is usually a stablecoin like USDC, which is pegged one-to-one to the US dollar. So "crypto payment" here does not mean volatile Bitcoin; it means a digital dollar that settles on rails that happen to be built on blockchain technology.

The five steps of a USDC payment

• 1. Quote: your checkout requests a price. Furlpay creates a payment for, say, $150 in USDC and returns the details.
• 2. Authorize: the customer's wallet signs an authorization (an EIP-712 signature) approving the transfer. No card number changes hands.
• 3. Screen: both sides are checked against sanctions lists before anything settles — compliance happens inline.
• 4. Settle: the USDC moves from customer to merchant on Arbitrum and finalizes in about a second.
• 5. Receipt: you get a signed receipt linking to Arbiscan, the public record of the payment, for your books.

Customer wallet ──authorize──▶ Furlpay ──screen──▶ Arbitrum ──settle──▶ Merchant
        (signs)              (quote + compliance)     (~1 second)        (receipt)

What is a wallet? What is gas?

A wallet is the app that holds the customer's digital dollars and produces the signature that authorizes a payment. Traditional wallets make you back up a twelve-word "seed phrase," which is easy to lose or get phished. Furlpay uses passkey wallets instead — the same Face ID or fingerprint mechanism you already use to sign in — so there is no seed phrase. Gas is the tiny network fee paid to process a transaction; on Arbitrum it is a fraction of a cent, and Furlpay can sponsor it so customers do not need to hold a separate token to pay it. We wrote about replacing the seed phrase with passkeys if you want the security detail.

How is this different from a card payment?

The finality point cuts both ways. No chargebacks means no friendly fraud and no dispute fees for you — but it also means refunds are something you issue deliberately through the API, not something a bank claws back. For a fuller cost breakdown, see Crypto vs Card Fees: The Real Math.

Do my customers need to understand any of this?

No — and that is the point. A good stablecoin checkout feels closer to a card checkout than to a crypto app: the customer approves with a passkey and the payment settles. The blockchain, the gas, and the screening happen underneath. Your job as a merchant is to add the checkout; Furlpay handles the rest.

Getting started

You can accept your first USDC payment from a hosted checkout link without writing code, or integrate the API in an afternoon. Start with the quickstart, read how merchant acceptance works, or estimate your savings with the fee calculator.

A stablecoin payment is just digital dollars moving directly from one account to another, recorded once, and final. Everything else is plumbing you do not have to see.

Furlpay is not a bank. This guide is informational and not financial advice. On-chain payments are final; issue refunds deliberately through the API.