Industry
Crypto payments for marketplaces: splitting fees on-chain without holding anyone's money
QBitFlow Team
3 min read
On this page · 5 sections
If you run a marketplace, a platform, or a creator network, your payment problem is different from a single merchant's. You're not just collecting money, you're splitting it: your cut and the vendor's cut, on every single transaction. Do that with a custodial processor and you've become a money-handling middleman, with all the licensing and freeze-risk that implies.
Here's how to take your cut automatically, on-chain, without holding anyone's funds unless you choose to.
The split happens at settlement, not after
The clean model is simple: when a customer pays a vendor you pay directly, the smart contract splits the payment in the payment's own transaction. QBitFlow's fee is taken, your platform fee routes to you, and the remainder routes to the vendor. No manual reconciliation, no batch payout job at the end of the month.
You set a fee per vendor, from 0 to 50%, taken from what remains after QBitFlow's fee. The contract enforces it. Nobody has to trust a spreadsheet.
Vendors who don't have a wallet yet
The hard part of onboarding vendors to crypto is that most of them aren't crypto-native. Making a freelancer set up a wallet before they can earn a cent kills your signup funnel.
A trust layer solves this. Your vendor joins your organization by accepting your invitation, with an email and a password, and no wallet. While you hold their funds, their payments go to your platform's wallet: QBitFlow's fee is paid, and the vendor's share is recorded as owed to them, with the on-chain transaction of every payment, so it's all verifiable. Your commission is recorded as earned and simply stays in your wallet.
When the vendor is ready, they add their own wallet. You release what you hold for them from the dashboard, signed with your wallet, and you can trust them so their new payments go straight to them. What's already held stays held until you release it. You never had to gate onboarding behind a wallet setup.
(One honest boundary: a subscription's receiver is fixed on-chain when it's created. A subscription created while you hold a vendor's funds pays your wallet for its whole life, even after you trust them, and each bill is added to what you owe them. It's worth knowing up front.)
Books that actually reconcile
Marketplaces have the worst accounting problem in payments: you need to reconcile your cut against every vendor's, across every transaction. The accounting export gives you that in one file, CSV or JSON, up to three months at a time. One row per event (a payment, a subscription bill, a refund, or the commission you earned on a vendor's payment), each with its gross amount, QBitFlow's fee, your organization fee and the net, in the token and in USD, its network fees apart with who paid them, plus the transaction hash and a block-explorer link. The amounts are the on-chain split, so gross always equals the fees plus the net.
What it costs, what you keep
QBitFlow's fee is 0.99% per transaction, down to 0.5% as your volume grows, taken on-chain, with no monthly platform bill. Your platform's cut is separate and set by you, and comes out of what remains after QBitFlow's fee. Your vendors receive the exact token the customer paid, with no conversion and no slippage. The customer pays the network fee on top. And QBitFlow never custodies the customer's money in transit.
Getting started
Connect your wallet (extension or QR, no seed phrases), set your per-vendor fee, and run a full split flow in test mode, on test networks with test tokens from the dashboard's faucet. The contracts are open-source on GitHub and verifiable on-chain (the Solana program's verified build is pending). They're not formally audited yet; the source is public, so you can read exactly how the split is enforced before you trust it.
