About Railbed
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. Railbed never holds your money.
Why we built it
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 problem is not the card. It is the balance. As long as a processor holds your money between the sale and the payout, it can freeze it. Railbed removes that balance. 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 it works
You publish a checkout and share a link, or connect your site to the API. A buyer pays by card, or with a wallet such as Apple Pay, Google Pay or PayPal where the provider supports it. The card is charged by an independent, licensed on-ramp provider, which converts the payment to USDC. Our payment infrastructure partner then forwards the USDC to your wallet and takes the agreed fees out along the way.
Smart Routing sends each buyer to the provider most likely to accept the payment at their amount and location, with the fewest identity checks. Providers make their own decisions about identity checks, and we do not promise that a buyer will never be asked.
Signing up takes a business name, an email address, a password and a Polygon wallet address you control. There is no application, no credit check, no documents and no reserve.
What we are not
Railbed is not a bank, a money transmitter, a payment processor or an exchange. We do not issue, sell or custody cryptocurrency. Card payments are handled by licensed providers, and funds move directly to the merchant's own wallet. That design is deliberate: if we cannot hold your money, we cannot freeze it.
Who operates it
Railbed is operated by DeepWork, and is referred to in our legal documents as 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.
Get in touch
New merchants can sign up in about a minute. For anything else, the contact page lists the right address for each purpose, or write to hello@railbed.io.