How to Pay Affiliates in Stablecoins

To pay affiliates in stablecoins, you export the approved commissions from your tracking platform, upload the file, and send USDC or USDT to each affiliate's wallet. Payments arrive in minutes, and the fee is the same whether you send $20 or $20,000. It works best for networks and iGaming operators with many small commissions to affiliates in countries where wires and PayPal are slow or limited.

Most affiliate programmes do not fail on tracking. They fail on payday.

The tracking platform knows exactly who earned what. Then finance has to get that money to 300 people in 40 countries, in the same week, without the fees eating the small commissions and without half the payments bouncing back. Wires take days and cost a fixed fee that makes a $40 commission pointless. PayPal is capped or unavailable in the regions where the best-performing partners are. So teams end up running four or five payout methods side by side, and someone spends the first week of every month reconciling them.

My first job was at a casual gaming company with a global affiliate network, and I watched the same payout problem every month in 2010: minimum thresholds to cover the fees, delays, reversals. Sixteen years later most networks are still running it that way.

Stablecoins change the shape of that problem. This guide explains how paying affiliates in USDC or USDT actually works, when it is the right call and when it is not, and how to run your first batch. It is written for the people who own the payout run at an affiliate network, a performance agency or an iGaming operator.

Who this is for

You will get the most out of this if some of the following are true:

• You pay 50 or more affiliates a month, on a monthly or bi-weekly rev-share cycle.
• A meaningful share of them are outside the US and EU: LATAM, Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans.
• Your average commission is small enough that a $25 wire fee is a real problem.
• Some affiliates have already asked to be paid in stablecoins, or you suspect they would take it.
• You are an iGaming operator whose bank has ever frozen or questioned a payout run.

If none of these apply, and every affiliate has a local bank account in a well-served country, a conventional rail may be fine. The section on when stablecoins are not the answer is further down.

What a stablecoin payout actually is

A stablecoin is a digital dollar. USDC and USDT are the two most used; each unit is meant to hold the value of one US dollar and moves over a public blockchain rather than through a bank. When you pay an affiliate in stablecoins, you are sending them dollars that arrive in minutes, at any hour, to any country not under sanctions, for a network fee that is the same whether the payment is $20 or $20,000.

Three things follow from that, and they are the whole reason this is worth reading.

Speed. Settlement is measured in minutes, not banking days. A batch approved on Friday evening has landed before Saturday morning.

Cost that does not depend on ticket size. A wire costs roughly the same whether it carries $40 or $4,000, which is why small commissions get held back and bundled. A stablecoin transfer costs cents on most networks. That makes weekly or even daily payouts realistic.

Reach. The affiliate needs a wallet, not a bank account in a supported country. For partners in markets where PayPal is capped or local banks charge 3% on incoming dollars, this is the difference between getting paid in full and getting paid late and short.

Here is how the three most common ways to pay affiliates compare:

It comes down to cash flow. Affiliates spend what they earn on getting the next batch of players in, so a payout isn't income landing, it's next week's ad budget landing. That's why they care so much about getting paid fast, getting the full amount, and not having the money sit with some bank in the middle. iGaming came to us first. I wasn't surprised, they've been told no by more banks than anyone else.

When stablecoins are the right answer, and when they are not

This is the part most vendor content skips, so here it is plainly.

Stablecoins are the right answer when:

• Partners are in regions where bank rails are slow or PayPal is restricted.
• Commissions are small and frequent, so per-transfer fees matter more than FX spread.
• Affiliates already hold USDT or USDC, or have asked for it.
• Your bank treats your payout runs as high-risk and has frozen or delayed them.
• You want one payout run for the whole network instead of one per region.

They are not the right answer when:

• Every affiliate is in the US or EU with a local bank account and you pay monthly. A local rail is cheaper to explain and nobody is waiting.
• Your affiliates need local currency and do not want to hold or convert dollars. Some do not; you should ask before assuming.

In practice most networks land in the middle: a local rail for the easy countries and stablecoins for the rest, run from one place. That is how a mass payout platform earns its keep: one batch per rail, one for stablecoins and one for local currencies.

One network, four payment gateways, one account

UB Ads Media runs affiliate campaigns across Asia-Pacific. Their partners are in South Korea, Australia, Malaysia and Indonesia: four countries, four banking systems, four sets of rules about what a foreign company can send and how fast it arrives.

Before Request Finance, that meant four local payment gateways. Each had its own onboarding, its own fee schedule, its own settlement time and its own reconciliation export. Payday was four paydays. The finance team was not paying affiliates; it was operating a small payments department.

They moved the whole network onto one Request Finance account. Affiliates who wanted stablecoins got USDC or USDT; affiliates who wanted local currency got a bank transfer. One approval per rail, same day. In the first month they paid out more than $50,000 through it. The four gateways went to zero.

How to run an affiliate payout batch in stablecoins

Here is the whole process, start to finish. It takes longer to describe than to do.

1. Export the payout report from your tracking platform

Every affiliate tracking tool can export the period's approved commissions as a CSV: affiliate ID, email, name, amount, currency, payment methods. That file is the input. You do not re-key anything.

Request Finance accepts CSV upload. Five columns and you are done: wallet address (where it goes), amount (what they earned), denomination currency (what that amount is expressed in, usually USD), payment chain (the network it settles on, set per row) and payment currency (the stablecoin that actually leaves your account), plus an optional email so the affiliate gets notified the moment it is sent.

2. Upload it and let affiliates choose their rail

Upload the file and each row becomes its own payout, one per recipient, sitting ready to pay. Nothing moves until you release the batch.

3. Review the batch

Before anything moves, you see the whole batch on one screen: who, how much, which rail, and the total. Duplicate payment detection flags any affiliate who appears twice or matches a payment already made during this period. If your approval policy needs a second pair of eyes above a threshold, the batch waits for them.

4. Approve and pay

One approval per batch transfer: one for stablecoins, one for local currencies. Stablecoin lines settle in minutes. Local-currency lines go out on the local rail and arrive on schedule.

5. Reconcile and close

Every payment carries the affiliate's reference and lands in one ledger, whichever rail it took. Export to your accounting tool at month end, or integrate directly with QuickBooks or Xero. The reconciliation that used to take the first week of the month takes the time it takes to check one export.

What surprises people about the first batch is how little happens. You upload the file, release it, and most of it is confirmed before you have finished explaining to your CFO what you just did. The one step worth not skipping is the test payment, and I say that because we built the feature and hardly anyone uses it. It costs you two minutes and it is how you find out the address on file for someone is one they stopped using last year.

What the affiliate sees

For the affiliate, it's simple. They don't sign up for anything or go through identity checks. They just get paid.

If they're paid in stablecoins, the money goes straight to their wallet address. If they're paid in local currency, it goes straight to their bank account. They get an email when the payment is sent, and that's it.

One thing to tell affiliates who take stablecoins: turning them into local currency is up to them, through an exchange or a local provider they choose.

Controls, compliance and what your auditor will ask

Paying in stablecoins does not mean paying outside the rules. Every payout has a reference, a timestamp, an approver and a ledger entry. Request Finance is SOC 2 Type 1: we work with sensitive financial data and therefore follow the best standards to ensure their protection.

For iGaming operators specifically, the question is often not compliance but access: banks that classify the sector as high-risk delay or refuse payout runs regardless of how clean the paperwork is. Operators paying affiliates in stablecoins sidestep the bank's risk desk without sidestepping the record-keeping.

Questions people ask before their first batch

Do affiliates need a crypto wallet?

Only if they choose to be paid in stablecoins. Affiliates who pick local currency add a bank account and never need one.

Can one batch mix stablecoin and local-currency payouts?

No. Two batches: one for stablecoins, one for local currencies.

What does it cost?

Stablecoin payouts are free on every plan. Local-currency payouts carry the rail's cost, shown before you approve. Plans start at $50 a month.

How fast is it?

Stablecoin payouts settle in minutes. Local-currency payouts follow the local rail's schedule.

Which countries?

Stablecoins: anyone with a wallet, in any country not under sanctions. Local currency: 190+ countries, 25+ currencies.

Is this different from paying in Bitcoin?

Yes. Stablecoins hold a fixed dollar value. Nobody is speculating; the affiliate receives the amount they earned.

What about Tipalti or PayPal Mass Pay?

Good tools if every affiliate is in a well-served country and commissions are large. Stablecoins win when the network spans hard regions or the commissions are small. Many networks run both.

How does this compare to Tipalti?

Tipalti is built for affiliate payouts at scale. It pays through bank rails and PayPal: local bank transfers, ACH, SWIFT wires and checks, in 200+ countries. It also handles tax forms and connects to tracking platforms like Everflow and CAKE. Mass Payments plans start at $249 a month, with a fee on top for each payment. It's a good fit if your affiliates want bank transfers and you need tax onboarding built in. Stablecoins make more sense when affiliates are in countries where bank transfers are slow or expensive, or when they've asked to be paid in USDC or USDT. Request Finance plans start at $50 a month, and stablecoin payouts carry no Request fee.

How does this compare to PayPal Payouts (Mass Pay)?

PayPal Payouts charges 2% per payment, capped at $20 for international payouts. If the affiliate's currency is different, PayPal takes another 3–4% on conversion. The money lands in the affiliate's PayPal balance, and moving it to a bank is an extra step. PayPal Payouts works in 96 countries and regions. That leaves out many of the markets where high-performing affiliates are based. On a $500 commission, the 2% fee is $10 before any conversion. A stablecoin payout of the same amount costs a network fee of cents.

Where to start

Pick the ten affiliates who are hardest to pay today, the ones in countries where the wire bounces or PayPal is capped, and run them as a first batch. If it works for them, it works for the rest. When you are ready to move the whole network, affiliate payouts in stablecoins, at scale explains what the full setup looks like, and how mass payouts work in Request covers the batch mechanics for any kind of recipient.

Nobody picks a network because the payouts are fast. But plenty of affiliates quietly stop sending traffic because the payouts are slow, and you never get told that is why.