About Railbed
Whoever holds your money between the sale and the payout can freeze it. Railbed removes that balance.
Railbed is checkout software for online businesses that mainstream payment processors restrict or refuse. Your customers pay by card. Each sale settles as USDC on the Polygon network, in a wallet you control, and Railbed never holds your money.
Why the balance is the problem
Supplements, adult content, licensed iGaming, CBD and dating are legal businesses in most of the places they operate, and most of them run on borrowed time with their payment processor. One review can disable payments, hold a balance for months and add the owner to an industry blocklist. There is usually no one to call.
The held balance is the part that does the damage. With Railbed, a card payment is converted to USDC and delivered to your wallet as part of the payment itself, so there is nothing for anyone to hold, reserve or reverse after the fact.
How a sale reaches your wallet
You share a payment link or checkout page, or connect your site to the API. A buyer pays by card, or with Apple Pay, Google Pay or PayPal where the provider supports it. An independent, licensed on-ramp provider charges the card and converts the payment to USDC. Our payment infrastructure partner forwards the USDC to your wallet and takes the agreed fees out along the way. At no step does your money pass through Railbed.
Smart Routing sends each buyer to the provider most likely to accept the payment at their amount and location, with the fewest identity checks. Each provider decides for itself whether to ask for ID, so we never promise that a buyer will not be asked.
What we are not, and why
Railbed is not a bank, a money transmitter, a payment processor or an exchange. We do not issue, sell or custody cryptocurrency. Licensed providers handle card payments, and funds move directly to your own wallet. That is deliberate. If we cannot hold your money, we cannot freeze it.
Who runs it
DeepWork operates Railbed, and our legal documents call the service Railbed by DeepWork. Our terms of service, privacy policy and acceptable use policy set out how the service works and what we expect from merchants.
Sign up, or write to us first
You can sign up in about a minute with a business name, an email address and a Polygon wallet address you control. There is no application, no credit check, no documents and no reserve.
To talk first, write to hello@railbed.com, or find the right address for your question on the contact page.