What if Vesta disappears?

Every payment company can go away: it can be shut down, run out of money, or simply stop answering. Here is what that would mean for you, written down before it matters.

The short answer

Your money never passes through us, so there is nothing of yours for us to lose. Every payment you have received is already in your own wallet, on a public blockchain, and it stays there whether or not this website exists. What you would lose is the convenience: the dashboard, the payment links, the emails. What you would keep is the money and the records.

Money you have already received

A Vesta payment is a transaction on Base that moves USDC straight from the customer to your wallet. We are not in the middle of it and we cannot reverse it. If our servers stopped this minute, nothing about those transactions would change. You can see every one of them on a public block explorer by looking up your wallet address, with or without us.

A payment that is on its way when we stop

There are two ways a customer pays, and both were designed so that nothing gets stuck with us.

Paid from a wallet. The customer signs one transaction that pays you directly. The contract that does the split lives on the blockchain, has no owner and no off switch, and keeps working without our servers. If our website is down, the customer cannot open the payment page, so they would simply not be able to start the payment; nothing is taken from them and nothing is held.

Sent from an exchange. The customer sends USDC to a deposit address that belongs to your invoice. That address is not a wallet we control; there is no private key for it anywhere. The money there can only ever go to two places, your wallet and the Vesta fee wallet, and anyone can trigger that forward, not only us. Normally our servers do it within a minute. If we are gone, you can do it yourself, in about five minutes, with the instructions below. Nothing sent to a deposit address can be lost by our disappearance; at worst it waits until someone presses the button.

Your records

Download a copy of your records from the dashboard whenever you like: Dashboard → Download my records. It is a plain spreadsheet file with every invoice, its payment reference, its deposit address, the transaction hash and the amounts. It contains everything you need for your bookkeeping and everything you need for the instructions below. We suggest downloading it once a month, the way you would keep bank statements.

If we ever wind Vesta down deliberately, we will tell every merchant by email at least 30 days beforehand and keep that download working throughout the notice period.

Forwarding a waiting payment yourself

You need three things from your records file: the invoice's payment_reference (a long code starting with 0x), your merchant_wallet exactly as recorded, and the USDC contract address on Base: 0x833589fCD6eDb6E08f4c7C32D4f71b54bdA02913. You also need any wallet with a small amount of ETH on Base to pay the network fee (a few cents).

1. Open the deposit factory on a block explorer: 0x01D5a80688EFF42c0c88453c463C9ea69fC06eDD on Blockscout (or the same address on Basescan, under “Contract → Write”).
2. Connect your wallet.
3. Find the function called sweep and fill in: invoiceId = the payment reference, merchant = your wallet address, token = the USDC address above.
4. Press Write and confirm in your wallet. When the transaction goes through, 97% of what was waiting is in your wallet and 3% has gone to the fee wallet, exactly as it would have with us.

If you want to check first whether anything is waiting, the explorer's USDC page shows the balance of any deposit address from your file. And if a customer sent USDC on the wrong network, the same factory exists at the same address on other networks, so the same steps apply there.

What about the 3%?

The fee is written into the contracts and cannot be changed, by us or anyone else. That cuts both ways: we cannot raise it, and it would still be taken on a forward you trigger after we are gone. We think that is a fair trade for a contract that has no owner and no way to be tampered with.

Your customers

We store very little about the people who pay you, and no identity at all — what we keep is listed on the privacy architecture page. There is no customer database that could be sold, leaked or taken over if Vesta changed hands.

Check it, do not trust it

Everything on this page follows from the code, and the code is short. It is published in full on the contracts page, and verified on independent block explorers so you can confirm that the code shown is the code that runs. The properties that matter here are that there is no owner, no pause, no withdraw, and that sweep can be called by anyone.

Questions about any of this: support@vestapayments.com.