Sell a file. Keep the money.

A price has to mean the same thing when the buyer clicks pay and when the money arrives. Quote it in something that moves and those are two different numbers, and one of you absorbs the gap.

USDC doesn't move. Ten dollars when you click buy, ten dollars when it lands. That's the only reason a payment can be checked against a price at all.

Base is where it settles because the costs there are small enough to stop thinking about. A transfer confirms in a few seconds and the network fee is a fraction of a cent, so a $3 file is worth listing.

MintLane is built for crypto-native sellers and crypto-native buyers. Paying takes a wallet and USDC on Base. For that audience it is routine, and it is what makes everything above possible: settlement in seconds, no platform cut, and no payment that can be reversed months later.

Settlement

~4s

on Base

Network fee

<$0.01

per transfer

Platform cut

0%

nothing taken

Chargebacks

None

payments are final

When someone buys your product, their wallet sends USDC straight to the payout address you set. It doesn't pass through an account belonging to MintLane, because there isn't one. There's no balance page here, no withdrawal button and no payout schedule. Those aren't features still on the list. There would be nothing for them to show.

So the money is yours the moment it lands, and there's no account of mine that can be frozen with your earnings inside it. The same design is why payments are final. If a buyer changes their mind, or a seller sends the wrong file, I can't reverse the transfer. Nobody can.

• Your keys, your payout

  You give MintLane an address to display, not access to it. Nothing here has permission to move funds out of your wallet.

• Nothing to run off with

  An exchange can lose your deposit because it's holding it. There's no deposit here to lose.

• You can check it yourself

  Every payment is a public transaction. Put your address into a block explorer and watch it arrive.

When a buyer connects their wallet, the checkout is recorded before any money moves: which product, at which price, going to which seller's address, from which wallet. A transfer has to match all of that. Six things are tested, and every one of them has to pass.

1. 1It is really USDCThe token has to come from the actual USDC contract on Base. Anyone can deploy a token whose symbol says "USDC", so the symbol is ignored and the contract address is what counts.
2. 2It is on the right networkA transfer on a different chain than the one the sale was quoted on is ignored. A payment on one network can never settle a sale on another.
3. 3It reached the right sellerThe destination has to be the payout address on that listing, not merely some address MintLane knows about.
4. 4It came from the buyerThe sender has to be the same wallet that opened the checkout. A payment from anywhere else does not unlock the file, even when the amount is exactly right.
5. 5It is the full priceAnything short and the sale is marked underpaid. The file stays locked.
6. 6It only counts onceA transaction already recorded against a sale cannot settle a second one, and a repeated notification changes nothing.

The notification that starts all this is itself signed, and an unsigned one is thrown out before a single field of it is read. Whatever the outcome, it gets written to a log with the reason, so there is a record either way.

Sending a different amount. If less than the price arrives, the sale is marked underpaid and the file stays locked. The money has already reached the seller, so recovering it is a conversation with them rather than a button here. Sending more than the price does unlock the file, and the extra stays with the seller, so it is worth getting the figure right in both directions.

Paying from a different wallet. If the right amount reaches the right seller from a wallet that didn't open the checkout, there's no way to show it was you, so the sale is held for the seller to review instead of unlocking on a guess. Where more than one open checkout could claim that payment, it says so rather than picking one.

In practice this means not editing the amount in your wallet, and not switching accounts between opening the checkout and sending. Both are easy to do by accident on a phone.

If you land in one of these, tell me and I'll help as far as I can, which is further than nothing and short of a refund. I can read the log, tell you exactly what arrived and which wallet it came from, and put you and the seller in touch. I can't move the money, because it was never mine to move. Full terms covering this are being written, and they will say what this paragraph says.

MintLane is one person. I'm @TroyQ3, and the payment checks, the design and the words on this page all came from one desk.

That's worth knowing before you trust it with a sale. There is no support queue, and no roadmap committee either. If you write in about something broken, the person reading it is the person who can fix it that afternoon.

It also means MintLane is new. There's no track record to point at yet, and I'd rather say so than fill this page with numbers. The part that matters doesn't depend on trusting me anyway: every payment is a public transaction on Base, and your money never touches an account I control.

If you're curious about something here, or you've found a bug, or you just want to tell me the writing on this page is wrong, I'd like to hear it.