NodeRails

Why are we still converting crypto to fiat to pay for things? Stablecoins like USDC and USDT have solved the volatility problem. Crypto wallets are everywhere. Yet when a SaaS company like Cursor wants to accept stablecoin payments, or when Booking.com wants to offer crypto checkout, there's nothing to use. The infrastructure simply doesn't exist.

Look at what Stripe, Dodo Payments, and Lemon Squeezy offer for fiat: checkout sessions, payment links, subscriptions with recurring billing, invoicing with tax rates, MRR/ARR analytics, webhooks, developer SDKs, dispute resolution, refund management, customer portals. Now try to find a single platform that offers any of this for crypto and stablecoins. You can't. The existing solutions are broken. They handle simple one-off transfers and that's it. No subscriptions. No invoicing. No chargebacks. No analytics. No developer SDK. No hosted checkout. And most of them are custodial, your funds sit in someone else's wallet.

There's a deeper problem: one of the biggest reasons consumers refuse to pay with crypto is the absence of chargebacks. With a credit card, if a merchant doesn't deliver, you dispute the charge and get your money back. In crypto, the transaction is final. Send and pray. This isn't a feature, it's a dealbreaker for mainstream adoption. Merchants won't offer crypto payments because consumers won't use them without buyer protection.

NodeRails solves all of this.

NodeRails is the first comprehensive crypto and stablecoin payment infrastructure. Everything that Stripe does for fiat, we do for crypto and stablecoins, natively, across EVM chains. Non-custodial. Smart contract governed. Developer-first.

What makes us different:

• Non-custodial by design. Funds flow from the customer's wallet into an on-chain escrow smart contract, then directly to the merchant's wallet. NodeRails never touches the money. No intermediary custody at any point. The entire payment lifecycle, capture, settlement, disputes, refunds, is governed by auditable smart contracts.

• Chargebacks in crypto, for the first time. Every payment sits in escrow with a configurable timelock window. During that window, customers can raise disputes through a self-serve portal. Deterministic rules handle common cases automatically (duplicate payments, merchant no-response after 72h). All dispute resolutions are recorded on-chain. Customers get credit-card-level confidence. Merchants get finality after the window closes.

• Complete payment infrastructure. Not just a checkout widget. Hosted checkout, payment links, recurring subscriptions with auto-pull billing, professional invoicing with line items and tax rates, refunds, webhooks (14+ event types), customer management, and product plans with pricing tiers.

• Stripe-quality developer experience actually even better. A Stripe-style SDK with dot-notation API (noderails.checkoutSessions.create(), noderails.subscriptions.create(), noderails.invoices.create()), webhook signature verification, typed errors, idempotency keys, and API versioning. Merchants integrate in minutes, not weeks.

• Merchant dashboard with real business metrics. Payments, revenue, settlement tracking, subscription analytics, invoice management, customer database, payment link builder, API keys, webhook configuration, wallet management with audit trail, and per-chain/per-token breakdowns.

• Multi-chain, multi-token. Works across EVM chains. Merchants configure accepted chains and tokens per app, per payment link, or per invoice. Cross-chain settlement lets merchants accept payment on one chain and receive payouts on another.

• Gasless payments. Customers pay zero gas on stablecoin and ERC-20 payments. The platform handles transaction submission. The UX is as smooth as tapping "Pay" on a credit card.

• 1% per transaction. No monthly fees. Simple, transparent pricing. Pay only on successful settlements.

Why end-to-end crypto? The real question is, why are we still converting to fiat? With stablecoins, there's no volatility risk. With smart contract escrows, there's no custody risk. With on-chain settlement, there's instant, global finality. The entire fiat payment rail (banks, acquirers, processors, card networks) exists because money needed intermediaries. Crypto doesn't. NodeRails is built on this premise: let crypto be crypto, end to end.

Where Chainlink CRE Comes In:

NodeRails works end-to-end today. But the most critical operations (settlement execution, dispute resolution, escrow health monitoring, fraud screening, and cross-chain payouts) still run on our servers. That's a trust assumption. If our settlement worker goes down, merchant funds sit locked. If the dispute engine is compromised, outcomes can be manipulated.

Chainlink CRE eliminates this. We built 5 CRE workflows that move these critical operations from our servers to the Chainlink DON, trustless, decentralized, and verifiable which also solves regulatory bottleneck:

1. Auto-Settlement – Every 5 minutes, fetches payments ready for settlement from the NodeRails API, verifies timelock expiry, and batch-settles on-chain via DON-signed reports. Merchants get paid automatically without trusting anyone's server.

2. Dispute Triage – A deterministic rules engine running on the DON. Duplicate payments → payer wins. Subscription after cancel → payer wins. Merchant no-response after 72h → payer wins. Edge cases → escalated for manual review. Every decision is recorded on-chain.

3. Escrow Health Monitor – Compares on-chain escrow balances against expected values every 10 minutes. If drift exceeds a configurable threshold (stuck settlements, unauthorized withdrawals, balance discrepancies), it trips an on-chain circuit breaker, pausing the escrow before further damage.

4. Fraud Screening – Batch re-screens payer wallets using GoPlus Security API combined with on-chain dispute history. Produces a risk score (0-100). HIGH and CRITICAL wallets are recorded on-chain and auto-blacklisted from future payments.

5. Cross-Chain Settlement (CCIP) – Payment captured on one chain, merchant wants settlement on another. CRE validates the CCIP lane and triggers the cross-chain transfer, fully automated.

CRE also solves a massive legal challenge. Payment processing involves regulatory obligations around settlement timing, dispute handling, and fraud prevention. By automating and decentralizing these operations through Chainlink CRE, we remove human discretion from the loop. Settlement happens deterministically when the timelock expires. Disputes are resolved by programmatic rules, not subjective decisions. Fraud screening runs on verifiable third-party data. This isn't just a technical upgrade, it's a compliance architecture. The DON provides an auditable, tamper-proof execution environment that regulators can verify.

A dedicated NodeRailsCREReceiver smart contract sits between the CRE workflows and our escrow. It holds the TransactionKey role, the same authority as our backend, but executes through DON consensus instead of a centralized server. The existing backend workers remain as fallbacks. CRE is additive, not destructive.

All 5 workflows are built with real @chainlink/cre-sdk, simulate successfully, and broadcast real on-chain transactions on Sepolia using the --broadcast flag.

More Details in readme !

First off all I want to convey we are taking this project as startup and because of that reason we won't be able to provide core information how the system is built and work but an overview is provided in readme of the github and demo video and technical details are focused on chainlink CRE Usage.