How payments work

Digital wallets

To send (and receive) payments, you must have an account with a compatible digital wallet. Not all digital wallets support sending payments with Web Monetization.

A digital wallet is the entity that supplies you with the financial account you’ll use to make payments. Funding your account typically requires you to link a card or bank to your wallet.

Since wallet providers are a type of financial entity, they are regulated within the countries they operate. One type of regulation, known as KYC (Know Your Customer), requires such entities to collect personal information and verify your identity before allowing you to open an account.

Web Monetization-compatible digital wallets

You must have an account with a compatible digital wallet to send payments. Be sure to select a wallet that’s available in your region and supports your preferred currency.

Your wallet provider will assign your account a unique ID called either a payment pointer or a wallet address. This ID is kind of like an account name. It’s a publicly shareable ID that you will need when linking your Web Monetization extension to your wallet.

The format of the ID depends on whether your wallet provider assigned you a payment pointer or a wallet address.

ID name	Example format
Payment pointer	$wallet.example.com/alice
Wallet address	https://wallet.example.com/alice

Web Monetization extension

You’ll use the Web Monetization extension to enable and configure payments.

Danger

Need the extension doc before I can tighten up the rest of this section. Pieces to include:

• You are in control of your payments. Payments are only sent with your permission/consent. Sites cannot automatically pull payments from your account. It doesn’t work that way.
• Extension is linked to your wallet via payment pointer/wallet address and unique key (assuming you still have to do the public key step in beta).
• Linking the two gives the extension the permission it needs to initiate payments from your wallet on your behalf.
• Depending on how you configure the extension, could be streaming or manual one-time payment(s).
• A bit about how it works. As you browse, the extension checks each page for WM. When found, the extension grabs the wallet address/payment pointer from the page’s code to set up a payment based on your settings. Don’t go too much into payments. That’s the next section.

Payments

Your Web Monetization extension acts like a messaging service. It requests information from the recipient’s wallet provider, then passes the information, along with your payment instructions, to your wallet provider. It’s now up to your wallet provider to deduct the payment from your account and send it to the recipient.

Micropayments

If you’re already somewhat familiar with Web Monetization, you may have heard about how it supports micropayments.

In general, a micropayment is a very small payment. Each wallet provider is responsible for a few things:

• Deciding whether to support sending and/or receiving micropayments
• Defining what a micropayment is in the context of their business

Let’s say your wallet provider allows you to send micropayments and defines a micropayment as any payment under $0.05 USD. This means that you could send a single payment of, for example, one US cent. Web Monetization is designed to facilitate payments of even a fraction of a cent; however, you can only send that amount if your wallet provider allows it.