Where does the money go? Do you hold my funds?
Your customer pays a deposit address belonging to that one payment. The money is swept into our escrow contract, held for your refund window, and then released to the payout wallet you registered. You choose that window — anything from none at all to 180 days.
It never reaches an account of ours, and that is a property of the contract rather than a policy we keep. There are exactly two ways out of it — release to your payout address, and refund to the payer who sent it — and neither takes a destination as a parameter. There is no address either function could be pointed at, by anyone, including us.
What the hold buys you is the refund window. Money already in your wallet can only be given back by you sending it; money on the contract can be returned to your customer from your dashboard while the window is open.
Can I change my refund window after I go live?
Two different windows get called by that name, and only one of them is a setting you can revisit freely.
For a SUBSCRIPTION, the window belongs to the price. You set it when you create the price and you are never locked out of it — a new price can say something different, and existing subscribers keep the window they signed up under, because it is part of what they authorised.
For a ONE-TIME PAYMENT, the window is written into the escrow contract when your chain is enrolled, and the contract is the authority from then on. Whether you can move it yourself depends on which version of the contract your account is on: your Settings screen says which, and if it cannot be changed from there it names the address to write to. We will move it for you.
Either way, nothing already outstanding moves. A payment being held keeps the window it was collected under, and so does a subscription — so changing this can never end a refund period a customer is already inside.
Can a customer charge back a USDT payment?
No. A blockchain transfer cannot be reversed by the sender, their bank, or a card network, so there is no chargeback process and no chargeback fees.
This is the main reason merchants selling digital goods, services or cross-border move to stablecoin payments — card chargeback rates and the fees attached to them disappear entirely.
It cuts both ways, and we would rather say so: if you want to refund a customer as a goodwill gesture, that is something you choose to do, not something a network forces on you.
How fast do I get paid?
The payment is confirmed and irreversible within minutes. When it reaches your own wallet is a separate moment, and it is the one you set. Those two are deliberately not the same thing.
The gap between them is your refund window: your customer's money sits in the escrow contract, where you can return it to them and nobody else can move it — not us, not them, not a bank. When it closes, the money is released to the wallet you registered, minus the fee.
You pick the length before your first live chain is enrolled. It can be nothing at all, in which case each payment is released to you in the same pass that collects it and nothing can be returned to a customer through the contract, or as much as 180 days.
There is no weekend delay and no rolling reserve held back against future disputes. A card payment also takes days to arrive, and then stays reversible for months afterwards; this one is final from the moment it confirms.
Can I refund a customer?
Yes, and you are the one who does it: while the payment is still inside its hold window you can return part or all of it to the payer from your dashboard, and it goes back to the address it came from.
paygate cannot do it for you and cannot do it to you. The contract accepts a return only from the wallet you registered, never from us — so a payer who wants money back asks you, the same as anywhere else.
Once the window closes the money is in your own wallet and the contract has nothing left to return. After that a refund is an ordinary transfer you send yourself — which is also the whole story from the start if you set your window to nothing, so that is a choice worth making deliberately.
Can I convert USDT to my local currency?
Not through paygate — we deliver USDT to your wallet, and converting it to local currency is something you do at an exchange or with a broker you already use.
We can price in your local currency, so your customer sees a figure they recognise and pays the USDT equivalent at the current rate. But the money that arrives is USDT.