NOWPayments

NOWPayments is the gateway you will find behind crypto checkouts at hosting providers and mid-sized online businesses, and its defining characteristic is that it does not hold the money.

Non-custodial, and what that means for a merchant

Payments route to the merchant’s wallet. The provider orchestrates the checkout, watches the chain and confirms the payment, but never takes possession.

For a merchant that means no counterparty holding their revenue, and it means they now hold stablecoins and are responsible for whatever comes next — conversion, treasury, accounting. Some merchants want exactly that. Others discover they wanted a bank deposit.

Breadth as a strategy

The supported asset list is long, and the network list with it. That suits merchants whose customers arrive with whatever they happen to hold, which is the reality for hosting providers serving a global technical audience.

The cost of breadth is edge cases: more assets means more chances for a customer to send the wrong thing on the wrong network. Merchants using gateways like this should expect a small but steady stream of support tickets that a narrow asset list would never generate.

For payers

Wide coin choice, cheap networks available, and a checkout that generally works well. As always, match the network exactly — the breadth that makes this gateway useful also makes the network selector the most important control on the page.