Before you begin

Complete these setup steps before integrating AinePay into your backend.

1. Sign up for an AinePay account

You only need an email address to register. After registration, sign in to the merchant dashboard and go to Profile to complete the rest of the setup.

2. Merchant status and processing fees

After registration, your merchant account is not activated automatically. You need to top up your processing fee balance to above 10 USD to activate merchant status and unlock the full payment features. On the dashboard overview page, you can see your processing fee deposit address and processing fee balance. Processing fees are deducted from that balance after your customer deposits arrive.

When your merchant balance becomes low, AinePay sends an email reminder before service is affected. If the balance later drops to 0 USD or below, merchant status changes to inactive and payment capabilities become limited. In that case, you need to top up the processing fee balance again to reactivate the account.

The current default fee schedule is:

For the first successful deposit to the same customer deposit address on the same chain, a fixed fee of 0.5 USD applies and the schedule above does not apply. Later deposits follow the schedule above.

If you have custom fee requirements, please contact us at support@ainepay.com.

3. Set your fund collection address

A fund collection address is the merchant-designated address that ultimately receives payment funds. Your customer payment addresses are deterministically derived from this address according to the smart contract rules, so you should keep this address secure.

Merchants can configure multiple collection addresses. When creating an order, you can specify which collection address to use. If you do not specify one, AinePay uses your latest collection address by default.

When creating orders, merchants should always obtain the actual payment address from AinePay. Otherwise, the platform cannot correctly manage the order and its payment lifecycle for that address. If needed, you can verify the returned address afterwards using the deterministic address generation rules.

The deterministic relationship between the fund collection address and each customer payment address, together with their contract-level binding, is a core part of AinePay's design to avoid taking custody of merchant addresses. See the Non-Custodial section for a cryptographic explanation of how the payment and collection flows are built on top of the collection address.

4. Payment Link

Payment Link does not require any code development. After a merchant successfully creates an order in the AinePay dashboard, AinePay will send the payment link to the email address you specified. Alternatively, you can copy the payment link or address information from the dashboard and send it to your customer. The customer clicks the link or completes payment through other means to finish the transaction.

If you only need this feature, use Payment Link directly — there is no need to use the API. The remaining sections are for reference only.

5. Create your merchant API keys in Profile

AinePay provides two kinds of merchant keys:

Key secrets are shown only once when first created, and are permanently hidden afterwards. If you forget a secret, delete that key and create a new one. For the full signing and verification flow, see API Authentication.

You must store these keys securely. They are part of the security model that protects request signing and payment notification verification.

6. Prepare a webhook endpoint for asynchronous payment notifications

AinePay validates the notify URL when you add it. It is usually easiest to prepare and test the endpoint first, then return to the merchant dashboard to add the notify URL. See the Webhooks section for the detailed callback model and notification fields.