File: 001  ·  Sovrn / Private Beta  ·  Brisbane, AU

Crypto payments
we can't turn off.

Funds settle direct to your wallet, on-chain. Zero KYC. Live in under a minute. Accept 250+ cryptocurrencies at 0.5% — half what BitPay charges. Real human support, 12 hours a day, Brisbane time.

sovrn.ventures/c/pay_a1b2c3d4
aupeptides.shop
order #1847 · 2 items
Amount due
$184.20
0.00194 BTC
1 BTC ≈ $94,948.27 · locked for 29:42
NetworkBitcoin (mainnet)
Fee paid bySender
Confirms required0 (mempool)
Waiting for payment in mempool
bc1qx4dfp8h2gjyhc...4nkxa3
scan in any wallet · or tap to copy
SOVRN/NET · LIVE
uptime 99.97% · last block · sydney-1
Exhibit B — Field installations

Real merchants. Real interfaces.

What it actually looks like, plugged in. Five categories. Five product shapes. One settlement layer.

Drag horizontally to explore
aupeptides.shop CART · 1
RESEARCH USE ONLY

BPC-157 · 5mg

$84.99 $109.00
ships discreet · tracked
01 — Research / supplements
Stripe-banned by default. Crypto is the only payment rail that doesn't get yanked when a risk team in SF reads "research chemicals."
BTC/USD · 1h $94,837.12 +2.4%
Premium signals · daily setups

$99/month · 4,218 active

02 — Trading / FX / signals
Stripe rejects forex. PayPal freezes signal revenue. Your audience already pays in crypto — get paid the same way.
● Tunnel active
Frankfurt #3
DE · 46.21.149.218 · WireGuard
Up4.2 MB/s
Down38.1 MB/s
Ping18ms
Plan expires
May 28, 2026
03 — VPN / privacy services
Your customers chose you because they don't trust intermediaries. Don't betray that by routing payment data through Stripe.
Player div_qld VIP · TIER 3
Balance
$2,418.50
≈ 0.02547 BTC · last play 2m ago
100 25 10 5
04 — iGaming / casinos / sportsbooks
Card networks won't process gambling. Bank wires flag every transaction. Crypto's already where your players are.
m
maeve.x
2,184 subscribers · joined Mar 2026
USDT tip
05 — Adult / creator platforms
Visa/Mastercard restrictions. Pornhub-style purges. Holds on creator payouts. Crypto respects the creator-customer contract.
?

Whatever Stripe just rejected you for.

Firearms accessories · CBD & cannabis-adjacent · psychedelic-research · adult e-commerce · survey panels · cross-border B2B

Tell us what you sell →
06 — Tell us your niche
If a card processor has dropped you, frozen funds, or sent the standard rejection email — we want to hear from you.
Sample mempool feed
Why merchants switch

The processor
that can't turn you off.

funds we hold on your behalf
$0

We never touch your money.

You give us your xpub. We derive a unique receive address for every payment. The customer pays it. The funds are yours — already in your wallet, on-chain — before our webhook even fires.

We have no private keys. No reserve account. No "1-3 day holds." A court could order us to freeze your funds tomorrow and we'd have nothing to freeze.

BIP-32 · HD-derived · ~13ms address generation

Zero KYC. Email and password.

No business docs, no government ID, no proof of address. Because we don't hold funds, we aren't a money transmitter — we can't ask for what we don't legally need to collect.

$ curl sovrn.ventures/v1/merchants \
  -d email=ops@your-shop.com \
  -d password=********
→ live · api key ready · 38s

Built for the merchants Stripe drops.

Research peptides. Adult. iGaming. Trading and signal services. Firearms accessories. VPN. If a "risk team" in San Francisco has ever sent you a cancellation email — you're already our customer.

supported verticals: peptides, trading, vpn, igaming, adult, firearms, fx, +open
Exhibit C — Architecture in motion

How a payment travels
through nothing of ours.

From the moment your customer scans the QR to the moment your wallet sees the funds — here's the actual path. We touch zero of the money. Watch the packet.

w CUSTOMER phantom · ledger · metamask SOVRN watcher OBSERVES ONLY MEMPOOL block 879,234 PUBLIC CHAIN btc · eth · sol · 250+ m MERCHANT xpub-derived
01

Address derived

Your xpub + a single-use index → fresh receive address. Generated in your browser before the customer sees it.

BIP-32 · ~13ms · zero server-side keys
02

Customer pays the chain

QR scanned. Transaction signed in their own wallet, broadcast to the public network. We never see the private key — neither does anyone else.

phantom · metamask · ledger · trezor
03

Watcher catches the broadcast

Our process polls the mempool. The moment your address sees inbound, we know. We don't relay funds — only the notification.

mempool.space · llamarpc · helius · 800ms median
04

Webhook fires

HMAC-signed JSON to your endpoint within a second of detection. Funds are already in your wallet. Your code marks the order complete.

sha256 · 3 retries · 24h backoff window
Exhibit A — Field samples

The pattern, in their own words.

Anonymised composite examples. Names redacted, situations real. This is what lands in merchants' inboxes every week, and what we're built to make irrelevant.

Inbox  ›  Stripe
Important account update for [merchant]
S
Stripe Risk Operations
no-reply-risk@stripe.com
Apr 14, 2026, 06:11

Hi there,

After a recent review of your account, we've determined that your business presents a level of risk that we are unable to support at this time. Per our terms of service, we are discontinuing your ability to process payments with Stripe effective immediately.

Your current account balance of $14,238.20 will be held for 120 days from your last successful charge to cover any chargebacks, refunds, or disputes that may arise during this period. Funds will be released to your bank account on or around August 12, 2026.

We are unable to provide further detail on the reason for this decision, and this decision is final and not subject to appeal.

Stripe Risk Operations

› Verbatim template. Substitute "Stripe" with PayPal, Authorize.Net, Square, Adyen — copy is identical.
M
merchant_in_qld
@m_in_qld · Apr 14
···
third processor in 14 months. they just sit on $14k for 4 months "to cover disputes" — there are no disputes. there will never be disputes. it's a tax for the privilege of selling something a 25-year-old in SF doesn't recognise.
9:23 AM · Apr 14, 2026
42Replies 318Reposts 2.4KLikes
› Public reply thread of this kind has 2,800+ comments. We've read most of them.
ops-payments
B
Ben (founder) Today at 6:14 AM
team — got the email at 6:11. we're shut off. $14.2k held for 120 days. inventory for q3 was supposed to come out of that. need to find another processor today or we don't ship next week.
K
Kat (cofounder) Today at 6:18 AM
it's the 4th time. i'm done. let's just take crypto, pay the 1% and never deal with this again. anyone here got a non-custodial setup that actually works for us?
› This is the question that brought you here.
Pay or get paid in
250+ cryptocurrencies
Customers pay in any token. You settle in BTC · ETH · SOL · USDC · USDT — your choice. Conversion happens automatically via our integrated swap layer at the moment of payment.
How it works

A payment, in three moves.

Integrate in under an hour. The whole thing is one POST and one webhook.

01

Your server creates a payment

POST the amount, the fiat currency, and an order ID. We return a unique on-chain address derived from your xpub, and a hosted checkout URL.

# your server POST /api/v1/payments amount: 99.99 USD order_id: "ord_8421"
02

Customer pays in any of 250+ coins

The hosted checkout shows a QR code, the live exchange rate, a 30-minute countdown. We watch the mempool in real time. They pay. We see it within seconds.

# mempool detection tx a5b9c1... amount: 0.00251 BTC status: "received"
03

Webhook fires. Funds are yours.

We POST a signed JSON payload to your endpoint. You verify the HMAC signature, look up the order, mark it complete. The funds are already in your wallet — we never had them.

# your webhook POST your.com/hooks event: "payment.completed" signature: "sha256=8f4a..."
API

Two endpoints.
One webhook.

That's the entire surface area you need to integrate. No SDK. No client library. Just HTTP and a 6-line signature verification function.

  • One POST creates a payment and returns a checkout URL
  • One GET retrieves payment status by ID
  • One webhook fires when payment completes — signed with HMAC-SHA256
  • Idempotent — pass an order_id to dedupe retries
  • Metadata pass-through — attach arbitrary JSON, get it back in the webhook
Get full docs at launch
# create a payment
curl -X POST https://api.sovrn.ventures/v1/payments \
  -H "X-API-Key: sk_live_your_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "amount": 99.99,
    "currency": "USD",
    "crypto": "BTC",
    "order_id": "ord_8421",
    "metadata": { "sku": "PEP-001" }
  }'

# response
{
  "payment_id": "pay_a1b2c3d4",
  "checkout_url": "https://sovrn.ventures/c/a1b2c3d4",
  "wallet_address": "bc1q8x4...",
  "crypto_amount": 0.00105,
  "expires_at": 1715352000,
  "status": "pending"
}
import requests, hmac, hashlib

# create a payment
r = requests.post(
    "https://api.sovrn.ventures/v1/payments",
    headers={"X-API-Key": "sk_live_your_key"},
    json={
        "amount": 99.99,
        "currency": "USD",
        "crypto": "BTC",
        "order_id": "ord_8421",
    },
)
payment = r.json()
print(payment["checkout_url"])

# verify a webhook
def verify(body, sig, secret):
    expected = hmac.new(
        secret.encode(), body, hashlib.sha256
    ).hexdigest()
    return hmac.compare_digest(expected, sig)
import crypto from "node:crypto";

// create a payment
const res = await fetch("https://api.sovrn.ventures/v1/payments", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: {
    "X-API-Key": "sk_live_your_key",
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    amount: 99.99,
    currency: "USD",
    crypto: "BTC",
    order_id: "ord_8421",
  }),
});
const payment = await res.json();

// verify a webhook
function verify(body, sig, secret) {
  const h = crypto.createHmac("sha256", secret);
  return h.update(body).digest("hex") === sig;
}
// create a payment
$ch = curl_init("https://api.sovrn.ventures/v1/payments");
curl_setopt_array($ch, [
    CURLOPT_POST           => true,
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
    CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER     => [
        "X-API-Key: sk_live_your_key",
        "Content-Type: application/json",
    ],
    CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => json_encode([
        "amount"     => 99.99,
        "currency"   => "USD",
        "crypto"     => "BTC",
        "order_id"   => "ord_8421",
    ]),
]);
$payment = json_decode(curl_exec($ch), true);

// verify a webhook
function verify($body, $sig, $secret) {
    return hash_equals(
        hash_hmac("sha256", $body, $secret),
        $sig
    );
}

I spent six years inside the system
that drops merchants like yours.

Before Sovrn, I built payment rails for an Australian neobank. I watched the same playbook repeat from the inside, week after week: a "risk team" three time zones away reviews a merchant they've never met, doesn't understand the product, runs them through an outdated industry-code lookup, and shuts them down — usually with reserves the merchant can't recover for ninety days.

Research peptides. Trading communities. VPN providers. Adult creators. Online gaming. Honest small businesses doing real volume, demonetised because someone copy-pasted their MCC into a spreadsheet.

I built Sovrn because the architecture had to change, not the policy. Custodial processors will always do what their banking partners tell them. Non-custodial means there is nothing to take, nothing to freeze, nothing to "review." The merchant holds the keys. The merchant holds the money. The processor just watches the chain.

Non-custodial means it can't be turned off. No KYC means it can't be selectively enforced. 250+ cryptocurrencies means your customers can pay you in whatever they have.

About the beta: Sovrn is in private beta out of Brisbane, Australia. Early-access cohorts onboard 10 merchants per week. Support runs 9am–9pm AEST (12 hours/day Brisbane time). Confirmed early-access merchants include aupeptides.shop (research peptides) and others across trading, VPN, iGaming, and adult verticals. Real merchant testimonials will appear here as cohorts progress.
Exhibit D — Things we never do

The list of nevers.

The architecture decisions that make Sovrn impossible to misuse against you. There's no policy here that can change next quarter — it's just absent from the code.

×

Hold your funds

The receive address is derived from your xpub. We don't have the corresponding private key. We can't move, freeze, or borrow what's already in your wallet.

×

Run "risk reviews"

No underwriting. No questionnaires. No 5-day waits. The architecture isn't custodial, so there's nothing to risk-assess. Sign up → API key → live.

×

Process chargebacks

Crypto transactions are irreversible by design. Once they're confirmed, they're confirmed. ~0% fraud cost vs ~2-3% on card networks.

×

Reserve funds for 90 days

The thing Stripe does that wrecks your cash flow? Mechanically impossible here. Funds settle at the speed of the chain. Settlement = final.

×

Require KYC

Email + password. No business documents, ID, proof of address, or "what do you sell" interview. We never become a money transmitter, so we never collect what they'd require.

×

Drop you mid-quarter

No "we have decided not to support your business" email. The only way Sovrn stops working for you is if you stop paying the 0.5% — and we don't auto-charge anything.

×

Share your customer data

We see an address and an amount. No name. No card. No billing zip. No fingerprint. No "fraud score" sold to a third party. The chain is the only audit trail.

×

Charge surprise fees

No setup. No monthly. No "high-risk surcharge." No PCI compliance fees. No "currency conversion" markup. 0.5% on successful payments. That's the whole thing.

Exhibit E — Stack manifest

Built on boring infrastructure,
so it doesn't break.

No closed-source dependencies that can be sanctioned. No proprietary chains that can be turned off. Every layer is public, audited, and replaceable. Click any tag to read the spec.

Wallet derivation client-side
BIP-32 BIP-44 P2WPKH Bech32 Ed25519
Your xpub never leaves your browser. Receive addresses are derived deterministically, single-use, never reused.
Chain observation read-only
Multi-provider failover for every chain. If one RPC drops, we route to the next in < 80ms. Watcher polls every 800ms.
Webhook delivery your endpoint
HMAC-SHA256 3 retries exp. backoff 24h window idempotent
Every webhook signed with your secret. If your server is down, we retry for 24 hours. Replay-safe via deterministic event IDs.
Settlement coins on-chain
BTC ETH SOL USDC USDT + 245 via swap
Customer pays in any of 250+. You settle in the 5 majors of your choice. Conversion via integrated swap, on-chain, atomic.
Compliance posture opt-in
OFAC SDN EU consolidated UN list no KYC no MSB
Geofence sanctioned IPs by default. No customer-side KYC because we never custody. Merchant responsible for their own jurisdiction.
Infrastructure brisbane / sydney
AWS Lightsail Ubuntu 22.04 nginx Flask SQLite WAL Let's Encrypt
Boring, audited, replaceable. Single $7/mo VM today; we'll scale horizontally to multi-region in Q3. No vendor lock-in, no proprietary anything.

every component above is replaceable. nothing in this stack belongs to a single vendor. that's the point.

How we compare

You shouldn't pay 2× to take twice the risk.

Most "crypto payment processors" are just custodial bank-wire businesses with a Bitcoin sticker. Here's what's actually different.

Capability Sovrn BitPay NOWPayments Coinbase Commerce
Non-custodial (you hold the keys)
No KYC required ! (over $1k/day)
Time to first payment < 60 seconds 5 days 1 day 1 hour
Fee per transaction 0.5% 1.0% 0.5% 1.0%
Cryptocurrencies accepted 250+ 9 200+ ~10
High-risk verticals served !
Funds frozen / payment rejected Never (we can't) Common Sometimes Rare
Settlement On-chain, instant Bank wire (1-3d) On-chain On-chain

Comparison data reflects published policies as of 2026. Competitor terms change frequently — always verify before integrating.

Features

Everything you need.
Nothing you don't.

The whole product is the gateway. No "premium tier" gating basic features. Every merchant gets every feature.

Mempool detection

Surface payments the moment they hit the network — typically 5-15 seconds.

HD wallet derivation

Fresh BIP-32 address per payment. Your private key never touches our servers.

Webhooks with retries

HMAC-SHA256 signed callbacks. We retry for up to 24 hours with exponential backoff.

Hosted checkout

QR code, countdown, live status. Mobile-perfect. Drop the URL in any email.

Custom checkout (white-label)

Build your own checkout with our Payment object. We just watch the chain.

Live exchange rates

From CoinGecko, refreshed every 60s. Locked at checkout for 30 min.

Auto-swap layer

Customer pays in any of 250+. You settle in your preferred 5. We handle conversion.

Idempotent API

Pass an order_id — we'll dedupe retries automatically. No double-charges, ever.

Metadata pass-through

Attach arbitrary JSON to a payment. Get it back, signed, in the webhook.

Global by default

Customers pay from anywhere. We block only OFAC-sanctioned regions, by IP.

Sanctions screening

OFAC SDN list checks at IP-level. You stay compliant without doing any work.

12-hour Brisbane support

Real humans, 9am–9pm AEST. Email, Telegram, Signal. No bots. No tickets. Same-day responses.

Pricing

Simple. Honest.
Half what BitPay charges.

One number. No tiers. No "starter plan" that locks features. No monthly minimums. You pay only when you get paid.

Flat rate
0.5%
per successful transaction
No monthly fee · No setup fee · No KYC fee
No hidden cost. No "high-risk surcharge."
  • Unlimited transactions
  • Unlimited monthly volume
  • All 250+ cryptocurrencies
  • Hosted & white-label checkout
  • HMAC-signed webhooks
  • Custom checkout branding
  • OFAC sanctions screening
  • Real human support
Get early access
Volume discounts at $1M+/month · Self-hosted on request · hello@sovrn.ventures
Questions

Things merchants ask.

If something isn't here, email hello@sovrn.ventures. We answer same-day.

Yes. We're a non-custodial software service — funds move directly from buyer's wallet to merchant's wallet on-chain. We never hold your funds and so are not a money transmitter. We comply with US OFAC sanctions screening (we block IPs from sanctioned jurisdictions: North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk). Merchants are responsible for their own local compliance with their products and services.
Correct. Sovrn requires only an email and password to sign up. No business documents, no government ID, no proof of address, no utility bill, no bank verification. Because we never hold funds, we're not legally a money transmitter — and we can't ask for what we don't legally need to collect.
It means we never hold your funds, ever. You give us your xpub (extended public key — safe to share, can't move funds). We use BIP-32 to derive a unique receive address from it for every payment. The customer pays the address. The funds are immediately yours, on-chain. We have no way to move them, freeze them, or reverse them — we don't have the corresponding private key. Only you do.
250+ cryptocurrencies for payment. The customer can pay you in any of them. You choose what you settle in: BTC, ETH, SOL, USDC, or USDT. We handle the conversion automatically via our integrated swap layer at the moment of payment, at the live rate. No manual swap, no extra integration on your side.
We surface the payment as soon as it hits the mempool — typically 5-15 seconds for Bitcoin, 12-30 seconds for Ethereum, under 5 seconds for Solana. The webhook fires at this point with status received. For BTC, we send a separate confirmed event after one block confirmation (~10 minutes). You can configure your code to wait for confirmed for high-value orders.
Crypto transactions are irreversible by design. This means zero chargebacks — a feature for high-risk merchants. The trade-off: refunds are manual. To refund a customer, you send funds back from your wallet to their address. Sovrn provides a one-click "issue refund" flow in the dashboard, but the funds come from you, not us.
Payments within a configurable tolerance (default: 99% of expected) are accepted automatically. Underpayments below tolerance fall to status underpaid, with the actual amount logged. Overpayments are accepted and the surplus is yours. Late payments (after the 30-minute window) are accepted by default but can be set to fail. You decide.
Every webhook includes an X-Webhook-Signature header containing an HMAC-SHA256 signature of the request body, signed with your unique webhook secret. You verify it with about 6 lines of code. Failed deliveries retry automatically for 24 hours with exponential backoff. Full delivery logs are visible in your dashboard.
No. Sovrn is crypto-only by design — that's how we stay non-custodial. If you want to accept both, integrate Sovrn alongside Stripe, Square, or any fiat processor. Most of our merchants run dual rails: Sovrn for the customers who'd rather pay anonymously, fiat for everyone else.
Almost all. We block payments and signups from OFAC-sanctioned jurisdictions at the IP level: North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk. We also block IPs flagged in the SDN list. Otherwise, fully global — your customer in Argentina can pay you in USDC, your customer in Vietnam can pay you in BTC.
Two pieces: (1) one POST to /api/v1/payments when an order is placed — returns a checkout URL you redirect to or embed. (2) one webhook listener — verifies an HMAC signature, updates your order status. Total integration time: under an hour for any modern stack. Full code examples in the API section above for curl, Python, Node, and PHP. WordPress / WooCommerce / Shopify plugins coming Q2.
No catch. We're non-custodial, so we have no float risk, no insurance overhead, no transmitter licensing, and no compliance team to feed. Our cost per transaction is ~$0.001 (Solana RPC + a CoinGecko lookup). Charging 1% like the custodial competitors would be pure margin extraction. We pass that on.
We can't freeze your funds. The architecture makes it physically impossible — we don't have the private keys. Even if a court ordered us to freeze your funds tomorrow, we'd have nothing to freeze. The funds are in your wallet. (We can stop generating new payment addresses for you, but the funds you've already received are untouchable by us.)
Coming. We're working on an open-source release of the core gateway for merchants who want to run it themselves. If you're interested in being a self-hosted early-access partner, email hello@sovrn.ventures with your use case.
Email — same-day during our 9am–9pm AEST support window (12 hours/day, Brisbane time). Telegram — real-time, for merchants doing $10k+/month. Documentation, integration examples, copy-paste code. We don't outsource support; you talk to the people who built the thing. Our founder spent years inside the payment-rails system that drops merchants like you — we know exactly how the review cycle works because we used to run it.
Sovrn is built and operated from Brisbane, Australia. Support runs 9am–9pm AEST (12 hours/day, Brisbane time) — that's roughly 11pm–11am ET on the US East Coast, 8pm–8am PT on the West Coast, and a clean overlap with all of Europe and Asia-Pacific. Email is answered same-day during the window; Telegram is real-time for higher-volume merchants. Outside the window, urgent issues (payment failures, webhook outages) are still monitored and triaged.
Yes, no KYC. Under 60 seconds, end-to-end. You sign up with an email and password, paste your xpub or wallet address, and you have a live API key. No business documents. No government ID. No proof of address. No "underwriting review." No "industry questionnaire." We can't ask for any of it because we never hold your funds — there's no legal basis for collecting it. Most merchants are accepting their first payment within five minutes of signing up, and that's mostly the time it takes to copy the API key into their checkout code.
Drop your email in the form below. We're onboarding 10 merchants per week, prioritized by use-case fit and integration readiness. Most merchants go from waitlist signup to first live payment in under 5 days.

Get paid in crypto.
On your terms.

Join the early-access waitlist. We're onboarding 10 merchants per week, prioritized by use-case fit. Average waitlist-to-first-payment: 5 days.

→ About your business all optional · helps us prep
→ Schedule an onboarding call optional · 20 min · all times AEST (Brisbane)
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