How To Accept Cross Chain Crypto Payments for NFTs

Hi there!! 👋 I’m Harpriya, an engineer from Paper. In this tutorial, we’ll be learning how to add cross-chain crypto payments to all our NFTs so that we can make our assets more accessible and expand our audience and paying customers.

What does cross-chain mean?

Digital Assets like NFTs can only exist on a singular blockchain. Blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, and Solana all use different technologies to ensure that their respective cryptocurrencies and assets are secure. Cross-chain acts as a “bridge” across multiple blockchains to achieve interoperability. This means that cross-chain can enable the exchange of information, cryptocurrency, assets, and NFTs from one blockchain to another.

Why do I need cross-chain?

As a developer creating these assets, the main concern you’ll have is making sure you’re choosing the right blockchain and technology for you, and also for your audience and buyers. The blockchain you choose for development will impact the way your smart contract is written and determine the type of features you can offer. For your audience and buyers, it means they will probably need to convert their funds into the native cryptocurrency of your smart contract, which is tied to the blockchain you decide to use. This can be a huge hassle for the audience and buyers having to convert funds from one currency to another. This is what cross-chain solves. Cross-chain essentially creates a “bridge” to exchange money from one cryptocurrency to another. This means your audience and buyers would be able to purchase your NFTs regardless of which blockchain you decide to use and regardless of which cryptocurrency they already hold. Accepting cross-chain payments for your NFT sales make your work more accessible and has the potential to expand your audience by more than 10X.

How do accept cross-chain payments?

Accepting cross-chain payments becomes deceptively simply with Paper. If you’re unfamiliar with Paper, it is basically a tool that allows you to accept various forms of Payments to sell your NFTs, like credit cards or cross-chain crypto. Paper offers multiple solutions to this cross-chain problem, and we call it PayWithCrypto. To get a better understanding of how PayWithCrypto works, let’s try out the Paper Demo Checkout.

Head to https://withpaper.com/ and click on “Try a Demo”.

The “Pay With ETH” button allows you to pay with a popular cryptocurrency, Ethereum, while the Paper Explorers NFT is priced in a 2 MATIC. This means that the NFT exists on the Polygon blockchain and accepts its native currency, MATIC, but with Paper you can purchase this Polygon NFT using your Ethereum cryptocurrency. Pretty cool, right?!

Let’s explore the 2 main ways you can start implementing PayWithCrypto for your NFT checkout experiences. The first way is through your Paper Developer Dashboard. If you follow the first tutorial, you should already have a checkout in your dashboard. Click on a checkout, and find the “edit” button.

From here, you should be able to scroll down and see the toggle for “Pay With Cryptocurrency”. This enables the “Pay With ETH” button we saw earlier.

The second way to enable the “Pay With ETH” button is by using the <PayWithCrypto> React SDK component. We provide extensive docs to showcase just how to implement this in your NFT checkout. We’ve also created a sandbox environment for you to experience the checkout flow for <PayWithCrypto> !

P.S. If you’re based in San Francisco and want to learn more about how to 10X your paying customers with Web2.5, join us to Web3SF on August 26-27th, 2022! It’s 2 days full of speakers series and workshops series about how to get started in Web3 with any project. Paper will be there too! We have both a speaker session and workshop session schedule. It’s also completely free to attend. Come build with us! Hope to see you all there 🫡