What your payment processor knows about your business — and what we don't
Every card payment adds a party that learns everything and holds everything. We built Vesta so that party doesn't need to exist. Here is what a processor collects, what we collect instead, and where our approach has limits.
Every time a customer pays you by card, a company you have never met learns something. Not just that a sale happened, but who bought, what they bought, where they live, what card they used, how often they come back, and how that compares with every other business on the same platform. Over a year, your processor holds a more complete picture of your business than your accountant does.
Most merchants never think about this, because the arrangement is invisible and it mostly works. You notice it only on the day it stops working: the email that says your account is under review, the balance that is “held for 120 days”, the closure with no reason given and no person to call. On that day it becomes clear that the processor was never just moving money. It was the party that knew everything, held everything, and decided everything.
We built Vesta because we think that party doesn't need to exist for a payment to happen. This is a plain description of what a processor collects, what Vesta collects instead, and where the limits of our approach are.
What a card processor sees
A card payment is a request for permission. The processor, the card network and the issuing bank each look at the transaction and decide whether to let it through. To do that they collect, and keep:
The customer's card number, name, billing address and often email and phone. The exact items or at least the amount, the time, the device and IP address the order came from. Your business category, your refund and dispute history, your sales pattern by day and by country. A risk score for you and one for every customer.
That data is retained for years, shared with the network and the banks, sometimes with fraud vendors, and analysed continuously. The processor also holds your money for a period before paying it out, and can extend that period, hold a reserve against you, or close the account, based on its own risk model. You agreed to all of this in the terms. It is not a scandal; it is how card acquiring works. But it means your customer list, your revenue pattern and your cash flow live with a third party whose interests are not yours.
What a payment looks like without that party
Vesta is a payment link. You create one for an amount in USDC, a digital dollar. You send the link by whatever channel you already use: email, WhatsApp, your website, an invoice. Your customer opens it and pays from a wallet they control. If they don't have one, the page creates one on their phone using Face ID or a fingerprint; no app, no seed phrase, no third-party website.
The USDC then moves from the customer's wallet to your wallet in a single transaction on the Base network. Our contract splits it on the way: 97 to you, 3 to us. The contract's balance is zero before and after every payment. There is no Vesta balance, no payout day, no reserve. We verify the transaction on-chain before we mark the link paid, and that is the whole of our involvement in the money.
What we store — the complete list
We publish this at vestapayments.com/privacy, and we keep that page equal to what the database actually holds.
About a payment link: the amount, a description you typed, your order number, the expiry, the status, and a random payment reference. After payment: the transaction hash, the block number, the paying wallet address and the amounts.
About you, the merchant: your email address (it is how you sign in — there is no password), your business name, your wallet address, and a hashed version of any API key you create.
That is all of it.
What we do not collect, hold or see
We don't collect the customer's name, email, phone, postal address, card or bank details. There is no field for them; the checkout does not ask.
We don't create customer accounts. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to remember.
We don't hold funds. The transfer is wallet-to-wallet. We cannot pause it, reverse it, redirect it, or be asked to.
We don't run advertising trackers or analytics profiles on the checkout, and we don't sell or share transaction data. Your customer list is not our product.
We don't hold keys. The passkey wallet's key is created on the customer's device and never leaves it. We will never ask anyone for a seed phrase, and neither will any email that really comes from us.
The limits, stated plainly
A privacy claim that skips its own limits is marketing. These are ours.
Base is a public blockchain. The paying address, the receiving address, the amount and the transaction hash are public and permanent, as with any USDC transfer. Someone who can connect a wallet address to a person can see that person's payments. Vesta's privacy is about what we don't collect and don't hold; it is not concealment, and it does not make a public ledger private. If your customers need their payments to be unlinkable, a public-chain stablecoin is the wrong tool.
USDC is issued by Circle, a regulated company, and Base is developed by Coinbase. Vesta runs its own service on top of them and holds nothing, but we did not build the money or the network.
Your customers must already hold USDC, in a wallet or on an exchange. We don't sell crypto and we don't take cards. During the pilot, a customer with neither should be offered another way to pay.
We are a pilot. Vesta runs on Base mainnet with real USDC, for invited merchants, with a cap of 60,000 USDC per payment. Our contract's source code is published and verified on Basescan, and its balance can be checked by anyone at any time, but it has not yet had an independent audit. That is on our list before we open beyond invited merchants. Our application code is not open source today.
The fee is 3%, flat, taken inside the transaction. For a large merchant on a standard card plan that is more than they pay. For the merchants we are built for — the ones who have been rejected, frozen, or charged high-risk rates — it is usually less than the true cost of cards once holds, reserves and chargebacks are counted, and it is the whole price: no subscription, setup, withdrawal or hidden fees.
Why this matters more than it seems
The obvious benefit is that a third party can't freeze your money, because there is no third party holding it. The less obvious one is what happens to your customers. A customer who pays through a card processor has handed over their identity and purchase to a company they never chose. A customer who pays through Vesta hands over a wallet address and an amount, both of which were already going to be public on the blockchain, and nothing else.
We think this is the right default for small businesses that sell internationally, sell digital goods, or work in fields that mainstream processors treat as too much trouble. Traditional payments ask for more. Vesta is designed to expose less.
If you want to try it
Vesta is open to a small number of invited merchants right now. If you sell to customers who already use USDC and your typical order is under 500 USDC, write to us at support@vestapayments.com or on WhatsApp (+595 976 287 034), and tell us what you sell. We'll set you up together, and we'll ask you to tell us what confused you or your customers. That feedback is what the pilot is for.
— The Vesta team
What we store: vestapayments.com/privacy · How it works: vestapayments.com · More writing