Is there a BTCPay Server alternative that supports stablecoins on multiple chains?

BTCPay Server and stablecoins: what its docs actually say

BTCPay Server has earned its reputation. Its FAQ describes it as "a free and open-source cryptocurrency payment processor" and "a non-custodial invoicing system." It's released under the MIT license. You install it on your own server, connect a wallet by its extended public key (xpub), and every invoice gets a fresh address from that wallet. Your private keys never touch the server. "There are no subscriptions, no transaction fees."

It also comes with more than a checkout. There's a web-based point-of-sale app with a keypad, a cart, tips and inventory. There's a crowdfunding app, refunds and payouts through "pull payments," a REST API called Greenfield, and integrations for the usual e-commerce platforms. For a Bitcoin merchant with someone who can run a server, it's hard to beat on price: it's free.

Stablecoins are a different story, and BTCPay is upfront about it. Its Altcoins FAQ says: "Bitcoin is the only focus of the project and its core developers. However, opt in integrations are present for several altcoins." Those integrations "are maintained by their respective communities and are listed here only for convenience," and any that isn't actively maintained "will be removed from BTCPay."

Here's every route we found to take stablecoins on BTCPay Server, checked against its docs, its plugin directory and the plugins' own READMEs on 17 October 2026:

So yes, BTCPay can take stablecoins. But only one route, the USDt plugin, puts a stablecoin in your own address on more than one chain, and it covers one stablecoin. For USDC, every route we found either converts it into bitcoin or passes it through a third party. If you run a store that wants to be paid in digital dollars and keep them as dollars, that's the gap.

That gap is why we built Payzum the other way around. Payzum is a non-custodial, stablecoin-first crypto payment processor: payments settle directly to wallets the merchant controls. Below, we compare it honestly with BTCPay and with the other options, including the cases where BTCPay is the better choice.

What running stablecoins on BTCPay Server takes

Nothing here is a flaw in BTCPay. It's the cost of self-hosting, and it grows with every chain you add.

A server that never sleeps. BTCPay's deployment FAQ lists the minimum as 2 GB of RAM, 80 GB of storage with pruning, and Docker. It also says you can't start BTCPay only when you expect a payment: "you need to keep your BTCPay running at all times so that your Bitcoin node stays in sync." Each extra coin needs more storage.

Updates on someone's calendar. BTCPay shipped six releases between 25 June and 6 October 2026, from v2.4.0 to v2.4.5. The USDt plugin needs BTCPay 2.3.7 or later, and it had a new pre-release on 16 October. Every update is something to apply, back up before and test after. BTCPay's own FAQ warns that its backup scripts "have not been thoroughly tested for all types of BTCPay Server setups."

One node or RPC provider per chain. The USDt plugin watches each blockchain through a JSON-RPC endpoint that you configure. For TRON in production, its README says to use "a private TRON node or a dedicated, authenticated RPC provider." That's another vendor, another API key and another bill for each chain you turn on.

Coins your customers don't hold. USDC is the other big dollar stablecoin, and no BTCPay route receives it directly into your wallet. Circle says USDC is natively supported on 38 blockchain networks. Its public circulation data on 17 October 2026 showed $72.6 billion of USDC: about 66% on Ethereum, 9% each on Solana and Hyperliquid's HyperEVM, 6% on Base and 4% on Arbitrum. A buyer holding USDC on Base or Solana can't pay a BTCPay store in USDC.

Nobody to call. BTCPay's FAQ is plain: "BTCPay is an open-source project. It is not a company; there is no e-mail, live-chat or phone support." Help comes from GitHub and the community chat, or from community members who sell paid support. If checkout breaks on a Saturday, the fix is yours to find.

Shortcuts carry their own risk. To skip the server, some merchants sign up with a third-party BTCPay host. BTCPay's own docs say that "trusted third parties are security holes." A malicious host could "replace your extended public key with their own," so future payments go to the host's wallet. Their advice is not to use one "with high volume payments or extremely valuable transactions."

Paying people out in stablecoins. BTCPay's payouts run on pull payments, which its docs show on-chain and over Lightning. We checked the USDt plugin's source on 17 October 2026: it has no payout handler. Paying affiliates or contractors in USDC or USDT happens outside BTCPay.

Why it works this way: three questions, not one

When people ask for a BTCPay Server alternative, they're usually asking three separate questions:

• Who holds the money? BTCPay's answer is you, and that's the part most merchants want to keep.
• Who runs the infrastructure? With BTCPay, you do, or a host you trust.
• Which coins and chains are first-class? With BTCPay, it's Bitcoin and Lightning. Everything else is a plugin.

BTCPay's design puts these together on purpose: "you are your own payment processor." That gives you zero fees and full control. It also makes you the operations team for every chain you add. A stablecoin merchant usually wants to keep the first answer and change the other two.

That's possible because custody and hosting are separate things. Here are the five models you'll find:

• Self-hosted. You run the processor and receive straight to your wallet. That's BTCPay Server.
• Third-party host. Someone else runs a BTCPay instance and you get a store on it. Funds still go to your wallet if you connect an xpub, but you trust the host's server.
• Non-custodial, hosted. A provider runs invoices, checkout, chain monitoring and webhooks, and the payment settles to your wallet. That's Payzum.
• Custodial or forwarding. The provider receives the payment and pays you later, or passes it through its own address. If that's acceptable to you, our guides to BitPay, NOWPayments and Coinbase Commerce alternatives compare them.
• Protocol or do-it-yourself. You build on an open standard such as Solana Pay, or just share a wallet address.

Your customers already pay this way between themselves. Chainalysis' 2026 Global Crypto Adoption Index, published on 23 September 2026, found that domestic wallet-to-wallet transfers rose 302.9% to $228.7 billion between July 2025 and June 2026, and 96% of that value was in stablecoins. Those payments happen across many chains. A checkout that only takes one of them turns customers away.

BTCPay Server alternatives for stablecoins on multiple chains

We checked each option's public documentation on 17 October 2026. All five keep the money out of anyone else's hands. They differ in what you run and which stablecoins they cover.

1. Payzum: best for USDC and USDT on many chains, with no server

Payzum never holds, pools or controls merchant funds. The customer pays from their wallet and the payment settles in yours: the settlement is the payment. It runs on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, BNB Chain and Avalanche. Typical confirmations take about 0.4 seconds on Solana and about 2 seconds on Base or Polygon. If you also accept volatile coins, optional auto-convert to USDC or USDT is available on most supported networks, and the result still lands in your wallet (how auto-convert works).

Online, you get no-code payment links and buttons, a hosted checkout (redirect, modal or inline), invoices with an expiry time and overpayment detection, recurring subscriptions and donations. At a counter, the POS shows a new QR code for every sale, any phone works as a terminal, cashiers sign in with a PIN, and you get analytics per cashier and terminal. There are no chargebacks. Payouts live in the same dashboard: CSV mass payouts in BTC, LTC and DOGE, and stablecoin payouts on Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, BNB Chain and Avalanche.

For developers, there are 29 open-source integrations (WooCommerce, Magento 2, PrestaShop, WHMCS, Medusa and more), official SDKs for Node.js, PHP, Python and Rust, and signed webhooks. Security includes 2FA, encrypted secrets and a full audit log. Pricing is 0.5% per processed sale, plus on-chain network fees.

Limits to know: BTCPay is free and Payzum isn't. Payzum doesn't support Lightning, TRON, Liquid or Monero. That matters for USDT: Tether's transparency page showed about $184 billion in circulation on 17 October 2026, roughly 51% of it on TRON. Customers paying USDT to Payzum send it on Ethereum, Polygon, BNB Chain, Solana or another supported network. Payzum is crypto-only and never pays fiat into a bank. Sign-up includes KYC. And it's a hosted service: you rely on it for checkout, though never for the funds you've already received. Best for: merchants who want USDC and USDT on several chains in their own wallet, online and in person, without running anything.

2. Stay on BTCPay and add the Tether USDt plugin: best if your buyers pay USDT, especially on TRON

If you already run BTCPay and your customers mostly pay USDT, the shortest path is the plugin. It's MIT-licensed and published by the "BTCPayServer Tether Community" organization. It receives USDT on TRON, Ethereum and Polygon into addresses you control, and detects full, partial and overpayments. Payments that arrive after the invoice expires are still detected during BTCPay's monitoring window and marked PaidLate.

It's the only option in this list that covers USDT on TRON. The trade-offs are the ones above: a production RPC endpoint per chain, plugin updates alongside BTCPay updates, no USDC, and no payouts. Best for: an existing BTCPay merchant whose buyers pay USDT, with someone who can run it.

3. A third-party BTCPay host: best for trying BTCPay without a server

BTCPay's docs describe hosts that let local merchants receive payments "for free or for a small sign-up fee." You get a store on someone else's server and connect your own wallet's xpub. There's no server to maintain. Which stablecoin plugins you get depends on what the host has installed.

The catch is trust, and BTCPay says so itself. Never create a hot wallet on a host's server, and never share a private key: "If a third-party host asks for your private key or pre-generates one for you, be sure it's a scam." Best for: testing and small amounts, as BTCPay's own docs recommend.

4. Solana Pay: best for developers building on Solana

Solana Pay is an open protocol, not a company. Its documentation describes it as "a standard protocol and set of reference implementations that enable developers to incorporate decentralized payments into their apps and services." It's licensed under Apache 2.0, includes an open-source point-of-sale app, and the docs quote confirmation in under a second at an average cost of $0.0005.

The catch is scope. It only covers Solana, and invoices, order matching, webhooks and reporting are yours to build. Best for: a development team already on Solana that wants full control. If you want Solana speed plus other chains without building the checkout, Payzum settles on Solana too.

5. A plain wallet address: best for a handful of invoices a month

The simplest non-custodial setup is to send customers your stablecoin address. There's no processor fee, only the network fee the customer pays. Everything else is manual: nothing locks the price, nothing expires, and with one reused address you can't easily tell which customer paid which invoice. Best for: a freelancer billing a few clients a month in USDC. BTCPay's own FAQ explains why this stops working at scale: address re-use is "a privacy issue," and a new address per invoice is the fix.

When staying on BTCPay Server is the right call

Stay if your customers pay mostly in bitcoin or over Lightning, if zero processing fees matter more than your time, or if you value running the whole stack yourself, with no account at any company. Stay if your buyers pay USDT on TRON and won't switch networks: the USDt plugin covers that and Payzum doesn't. And if you only need stablecoins for some customers, you can keep BTCPay and add a second gateway next to it.

BTCPay Server vs stablecoin alternatives, side by side

How does Payzum compare with BTCPay Server?

Both keep the money in your wallet. The differences are in who runs it, what it's built around and what it costs. BTCPay facts come from its documentation, Greenfield API reference and GitHub releases, checked on 17 October 2026.

In short: if you want zero fees, Lightning and full control of the stack, BTCPay does that job. If you want USDC and USDT on many chains in your own wallet, plus a counter and payouts, without operating anything, Payzum does that job.

Self-host or not? The break-even math

BTCPay's own LunaNode deployment guide says that "for the price of around US$15.80 per month, you can have a self-hosted BTCPay Server," including a Bitcoin full node and a Lightning node. Payzum charges 0.5% per sale. Divide one by the other and you get the break-even: about $3,160 a month in sales.

• Below $3,160 a month, Payzum's fee is lower than the server bill alone.
• Above it, BTCPay's hosting is cheaper on paper. A store taking $20,000 a month in stablecoins pays Payzum $100, against about $15.80 for the server. Add to that the RPC provider for each stablecoin chain, the hours spent on updates and backups, and the fact that USDC still isn't covered.

The honest question is simple: is your time, plus the missing USDC, worth more or less than the difference? For a technical team that takes mostly bitcoin, BTCPay usually wins. For a shop, a café or an agency that wants dollars in its wallet and nothing to maintain, the 0.5% usually does.

How to add stablecoins next to BTCPay, or move off it, step by step

Because both are non-custodial, there's no balance to withdraw and nothing to wind down: your BTCPay funds are already in your wallet. That makes running both, or switching, low-risk.

1. Check what your customers want to pay with. Look at your BTCPay invoices by payment method and at the requests you turned down. If they're mostly USDT on TRON, the USDt plugin may be enough. If they're USDC, or stablecoins on Base, Solana or Arbitrum, you need another route.
2. Decide: run both, or switch. Running both is common. BTCPay keeps bitcoin and Lightning, and Payzum takes stablecoins. On WooCommerce, both appear at checkout as separate payment methods (see our WooCommerce setup guide).
3. Set up Payzum. Create the account, complete KYC and turn on 2FA. Connect wallets you control, choose coins and networks, and decide whether to auto-convert. Test on the sandbox first (staging.payzum.com).
4. Add or replace the invoice call. BTCPay's POST /api/v1/stores/{storeId}/invoices becomes POST /v1/payment with an x-api-key header. Send price_amount and price_currency, set pay_currency to "all" so the buyer picks the coin, and redirect to the returned invoice_url. Add an Idempotency-Key header, and keep your own uniqueness check on order_id, because the API doesn't enforce it server-side.
5. Write the webhook verifier. Verify x-nowpayments-sig as HMAC-SHA-512 over the key-sorted JSON body with your IPN secret. Reject events whose event_at is more than 10 minutes old, and deduplicate on event_id. The official SDKs do this for you, and our guide to signed webhooks covers the details.
6. Map the statuses. Payzum sends five statuses (table below). Fulfil on finished, after checking the amount, and nowhere else. Decide in advance how you handle partial payments and overpayments, since both land in your wallet.
7. Cut over carefully. Run one small real payment on each network you enable. If you're switching fully, keep BTCPay running for a day after your last invoice expires: by default it keeps watching expired invoices for 1,440 minutes, so late payments are still detected.

Here's the core change in a typical API integration:

# Before: BTCPay Server (Greenfield API)
POST https://btcpay.example.com/api/v1/stores/{storeId}/invoices
Authorization: token <API key>
{ "amount": "49.00", "currency": "USD",
  "metadata": { "orderId": "1042" },
  "checkout": { "redirectURL": "https://shop.example/thanks" } }
# -> send the buyer to checkoutLink
# Webhook: BTCPay-Sig = sha256=HMAC-SHA256(webhook secret, raw body)

# After: Payzum
POST https://merchant.payzum.com/v1/payment   # sandbox: https://staging.payzum.com
x-api-key: <Payzum API key>
Idempotency-Key: order-1042
{ "price_amount": 49.00, "price_currency": "usd", "pay_currency": "all",
  "order_id": "1042",
  "ipn_callback_url": "https://shop.example/payzum/ipn",
  "success_url": "https://shop.example/thanks",
  "cancel_url": "https://shop.example/cart" }
# -> send the buyer to invoice_url
# Webhook: x-nowpayments-sig = HMAC-SHA-512(key-sorted JSON, IPN secret)

And here's how BTCPay's invoice statuses, as its Greenfield API lists them, map to Payzum:

BTCPay Server alternatives in practice: seven merchants

The right answer depends on the business. Here's how the options map to real situations, including the ones where the honest answer isn't Payzum.

• A Bitcoin-only online bookstore in Berlin with a part-time sysadmin. Its customers pay in bitcoin and over Lightning, and it pays nothing per sale. It stays on BTCPay. Nothing in this article changes that.
• An outdoor-gear store in Denver on WooCommerce and BTCPay. Customers keep asking to pay in USDC from Base and Solana wallets. It installs Payzum's WooCommerce plugin as a second payment method. Bitcoin and Lightning stay on BTCPay, USDC lands in the store's own wallet, and the 0.5% applies only to those sales.
• A café in Lisbon with no IT person. A server in the back office isn't an option. With the Payzum POS, each sale shows a new QR on any phone, every barista has a PIN (how PIN cashiers work), and USDC lands in the café's wallet in seconds, with no chargebacks.
• An electronics wholesaler in Dubai whose buyers pay USDT on TRON. If the buyers won't switch networks, the honest answer is BTCPay with the USDt plugin and a paid TRON RPC provider. If they can send USDT on Polygon, BNB Chain or Ethereum, Payzum covers it without a server.
• A design agency paying 40 contractors in USDC each month. Client invoices are paid in USDC to its own wallet, and contractors are paid with stablecoin payouts on Base or Polygon from the same dashboard. BTCPay's payouts would have been in bitcoin.
• A SaaS founder on a free third-party BTCPay host. It started as a test and now takes real money. BTCPay's own docs advise against high-volume payments on a host you don't control. The founder either self-hosts or moves to a hosted non-custodial processor. Either way, the rule stays the same: connect an xpub, never a hot wallet.
• A game studio already building on Solana. Its developers want to own the checkout logic, so they build on Solana Pay. If shipping the game matters more than building payments, Payzum settles on Solana with nothing to build.

Common objections

"BTCPay is free. Why would I pay 0.5%?"

If BTCPay already does what you need, don't. The 0.5% buys three things BTCPay doesn't give you: USDC and USDT on many chains without plugins or RPC providers, nobody on your team maintaining a server, and stablecoin payouts and PIN cashiers in the same account. The break-even section above shows where the line falls for your volume.

"Hosted means trusting someone. Isn't that what BTCPay avoids?"

It depends on what you trust them with. With Payzum, payments settle to wallets you control, so there's no balance with us to freeze or lose. What you do rely on is our checkout being up, and you go through KYC to open the account. If running every piece yourself is the point, BTCPay is the right tool. If keeping custody is the point, both do that.

"Our customers pay USDT on TRON."

Then be careful. Payzum doesn't support TRON, and the BTCPay USDt plugin does. If your buyers can send USDT on another network, such as Polygon, BNB Chain, Solana or Ethereum, Payzum works. If they can't, keep BTCPay for those payments. Our USDT vs USDC guide covers the trade-offs of each coin.

"We'd lose Lightning."

Only if you switch fully. Payzum doesn't do Lightning, so merchants with Lightning customers usually keep BTCPay for bitcoin and add Payzum for stablecoins. Two gateways at checkout, each doing what it's best at.