Payment gateway
Helio
Solana-native payment platform for creators, communities and merchants selling digital goods.
Opens hel.io in a new tab.
Helio is a payment platform built around Solana, offering payment links, checkouts and commerce tooling with a focus on digital goods, creators and communities. It supports stablecoin payment on Solana and other networks, and is commonly used for one-off sales, digital products and paid community access rather than conventional ecommerce.
Capabilities
- Custody model
- non-custodial
- Settlement
- stablecoin, crypto
- Settlement notes
- Settlement is on-chain to the merchant's wallet.
- Fees
- Published on the provider's pricing page; confirm current rates directly.
- Shopify
- Supported
- WooCommerce
- Not confirmed
- API
- Available
- Hosted checkout
- Available
- Invoicing
- Available
- Merchant verification
- Not confirmed
- Geographic availability
- Broad, subject to the provider's terms.
- Merchant requirements
- A wallet and an account. Onboarding is light-touch.
Integrations
- Payment links
- Hosted checkout
- Shopify
- Custom API
- Discord integrations
Strengths
- Excellent Solana support with near-instant, near-free settlement
- Payment links make one-off sales trivial to set up
- Non-custodial settlement to the merchant's own wallet
Trade-offs
- Less suited to conventional ecommerce than general-purpose gateways
- Narrower plugin ecosystem
- Solana-centric, which is a strength and a constraint
Helio serves a market conventional gateways handle poorly: someone who wants to sell one thing to a few hundred people without building a store.
Payment links as the primitive
Create a link, set a price, share it. No plugin, no store, no integration. For a creator selling a digital product, a community charging for access, or a freelancer invoicing a client, that is the whole requirement.
Conventional gateways can do this too, buried behind an onboarding flow designed for ecommerce. Here it is the main path.
Solana economics
Near-instant settlement and fees measured in fractions of a cent change what is worth selling. A $3 digital product is a viable transaction on Solana and is not on most alternatives. Several of the use cases this platform serves only exist because the settlement layer is cheap enough.
Limits
Not the tool for a catalogue store with inventory, shipping and returns. The plugin ecosystem is narrower than general-purpose gateways, and the product assumes digital delivery.
For payers
Fast and cheap. A Solana wallet, a couple of seconds, done.