How an Orbit payment
actually works.
Being paid through Orbit is not a product doing something on your behalf. It is an ordinary on-chain transfer to an address derived from your own recovery phrase — no processor authorising it, no balance credited to an account, nothing to withdraw once it lands. This page is the step-by-step version, including the parts of it that are not finished.
Three things, and none of them is us.
Card payments have an authoriser, a settler and a schedule. An on-chain payment has a network, an address and a confirmation — and once you see how few moving parts that is, the rest of this page follows from it.
A network
Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana — whichever chain the money moves on. This is the field people get wrong, and it is the only one that cannot be corrected afterwards.
An address you control
Derived on your own device from your recovery phrase. Orbit never receives it and could not spend from it if it did.
A confirmation
The network includes the transaction in a block. How long that takes depends on the chain and its fee market, not on any schedule Orbit sets.
There is no fourth step where the money sits with someone. That is the substantive difference from a processor, and it is also the whole trade: no intermediary means no fee-taker and no freeze, but equally no dispute desk and nobody to call. What self-custody costs as well as what it buys is worth reading before you route real revenue through it.
What you actually do.
The Receive screen exists to get one string from you to the payer without either of you mistyping it. That is the entire job:
Pick the wallet you want paying
Each network has its own address. Choosing the wallet is choosing the network, which is why it comes first rather than last.
Hand over the address, the QR code, or your @name
Orbit shows the address as copyable text and as a QR code, and shows the @name linked to that wallet if you have claimed one. In person the QR is the safe option; a scanned address cannot be mistyped.
They send; the network confirms; it is yours
Nothing is pending on Orbit's side, because Orbit was never holding it. There is no payout to request and no clearing period to wait out.
Receiving is not gated on any surface. You can be paid while running Orbit in a browser tab, and you can be paid while Orbit is closed entirely — the transaction goes to the address, not to the app.
Receiving works everywhere. Moving it does not.
This is the one thing to settle before you start taking payments, and it is not discoverable from the outside — today you find it by trying to send.
Every build can be paid, because receiving asks nothing of the app. Signing and broadcasting an outgoing transaction happens in Orbit Desktop only — the other two prepare a send and then stop, on purpose, rather than failing at the final confirm. Money received on the browser build is genuinely yours and genuinely safe; it is the spending of it that waits on the desktop build. If you plan to forward or spend what you are paid, install that one first →
An @name is a shortcut, not a second network.
A 42-character hex string is not something you can put on an invoice, read down a phone, or trust someone to retype. Claiming @yourname gives you something a person can actually handle, and it points at the address you already control.
Be precise about the boundary, though, because it decides which one you hand out:
- Paying you from inside Orbit — a name resolves through Orbit's registry to your address
- Paying you from anywhere else — an exchange or another wallet has never heard of the name; give the address or the QR
- Either way the funds land in the same place, in a wallet only you hold the keys to
A standard name is free with a wallet; shorter and dictionary-word names are the one paid thing on the platform. Check whether yours is still available.
Where the balance you see comes from.
Orbit does not keep a ledger of what you are owed, because it has no way to owe you anything. It asks the network.
Balances are read directly from public network nodes and block explorers — the same sources anyone else could query about your address. There is no Orbit balance service in between, which is why an incoming payment shows up on its own schedule rather than ours, and why none of this depends on our servers being healthy.
Today that live read covers nine of the 13 networks Orbit can hold: the 8 it can create a wallet on — Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Polygon and Solana — plus Cardano. Bitcoin Cash, Tron, XRP and Stellar are held as addresses without a live balance read, so a payment to one of those arrives on-chain exactly as normal but you will confirm it on a block explorer rather than in the app. The full coverage table is generated from the app's own chain list.
A valid address is not a correct network.
Most warnings about this are written for the sender. It matters just as much when you are the one being paid, because you are the one who chose which address to hand over.
Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum and Polygon share the derivation path m/44'/60'/0'/0/0, so one key produces one address that is valid on all four. Hand that address to someone and every validity check they run will pass — on all four networks. Nothing about the address tells them, or you, which chain you meant.
Assets sent to your correct address on a network you did not intend are not gone from the chain, but retrieving them is a technical exercise many people cannot complete, and for some tokens it is not possible at all. Two habits remove the risk:
- Say the network, every time you give out the address. "My Ethereum address" and "my Base address" are the same string and a different instruction. The string is not the instruction.
- Hold a little of the gas token on any chain you accept. Funds sitting on a network where you have no gas cannot be moved off it until you get some there — and a payment you cannot move is not much better than one you did not receive.
One wallet or several covers the same trap from the setup side, including when it is worth keeping the money you are paid apart from the money you are holding.
What this does not give you.
A payment processor is not only a fee. It is a bundle of services, and taking payment on-chain means going without most of them. Better to know which ones before you switch than after.
No reversal, either direction
A confirmed payment cannot be charged back and cannot be refunded by anyone but you, by sending a new one. That protects you from chargeback fraud and leaves your customer without a dispute process.
No fiat settlement
You are paid in the coin that was sent. Converting it to a currency you spend, and whatever record-keeping that creates where you live, is yours to arrange.
No invoicing or reconciliation
Orbit shows an address and a balance. Matching a payment to an order is something you do elsewhere.
Hosted checkout is not open
Payment links that price an amount live in several coins are built but not open. There is no date attached to that here, and there will not be one until it ships.
None of that makes on-chain payment the wrong choice — it makes it a different one, and it is straightforwardly better on the things it is better at: nobody can freeze it, nobody takes a cut of it, and the settlement and the receipt are the same event. But a page that listed only those would be selling you something. The four boxes above are the parts you would otherwise find out about in the middle of a dispute.
Straight answers.
How do Orbit payments work?
A payment to you is an ordinary on-chain transfer. The person paying broadcasts a transaction to an address derived from your own recovery phrase, the network confirms it, and the funds are yours at that moment. Orbit is not in the path — there is no processor to authorise it, no account to credit, and nothing to withdraw afterwards.
That is the whole mechanism, and it is why it keeps working regardless of what Orbit is doing. Your keys were generated on your device; the network settles against a signature, not against a company's ledger.
Do I need an Orbit account to get paid?
There is no account to create. Orbit has no signup, no email confirmation and no identity check, because there is nothing on our side to attach them to. You generate a wallet, write down the recovery phrase, and you can be paid.
A standard @name is free with a wallet if you would rather hand out a name than an address.
Can I receive a payment in the browser app, or do I have to install something?
You can receive in any of the three builds — browser, Android or Windows. Receiving needs no permission from the app at all: the money is sent to your address whether Orbit is open or not.
Moving it afterwards is the part that differs. Signing and broadcasting an outgoing transaction happens in Orbit Desktop only; the browser and Android builds will let you prepare a send and then stop, deliberately. If you intend to spend or forward what you are paid, install the desktop build before you start taking payments, not after.
Does the person paying me need Orbit too?
No. They need your address and the right network — anything that can send on that chain will do, including an exchange withdrawal or a completely different wallet.
The @name shortcut is the exception: a name is resolved to an address by Orbit's own registry, so it works for someone paying you from inside Orbit. For everyone else, hand over the address itself — the Receive screen shows it as text you can copy and as a QR code, which is what you want for a phone anyway.
Will I see the payment arrive in Orbit?
On nine networks, yes: the eight Orbit can create a wallet on — Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Polygon and Solana — plus Cardano. Orbit reads those balances directly from public network nodes and block explorers, not from an Orbit server, so what you see is the chain rather than our bookkeeping.
For Bitcoin Cash, Tron, XRP and Stellar, Orbit today holds the address rather than reading a live balance from it. Those addresses still receive perfectly well — the payment lands on-chain either way — but you will confirm it on a block explorer rather than in the app. That gap is stated here rather than discovered.
Can I refund a payment, or can someone charge back?
Neither. A confirmed on-chain payment cannot be reversed by you, by the payer, or by us — there is no authority in the middle with the power to undo it. A refund is a new payment you choose to send back.
This cuts both ways and it is worth being clear-eyed about it. You are not exposed to chargeback fraud, and your customer has no recourse if you do not deliver. If your buyers expect a dispute process, an on-chain payment is not a drop-in replacement for a card.
Are hosted payment links or a checkout page available?
Not yet. Hosted checkout — naming a price in dollars and sharing a page that quotes it live in several coins — is built but is not open, and we would rather say so here than have you find out at the checkout.
Getting paid to your address or your @name works today and depends on none of it.
Get paid to keys
only you hold.
No account, no processor, and no payout to wait for. Claim the name people will pay.