- How is this different from paying directly in USDC?
- Standard USDC transfers leave the amount, sender, and recipient on-chain forever. NinjaPay routes the value leg through Umbra shielded UTXOs — amounts and recipients are private by default. Compliance grants let merchants share viewing keys with auditors when they need to.
- Can I migrate from Stripe?
- Yes — that's an explicit design target. PaymentIntents, Subscriptions, Invoices, Refunds, Disputes, Webhooks all speak Stripe-compatible wire shapes. The migration is mostly a base-URL change plus signing over a wallet instead of an API key.
- What does x402 mean and why do I care?
- x402 is the open standard that lets HTTP servers price endpoints natively. AI agents (Claude, GPT, Vercel AI, LangChain) discover the price, pay, and retry the request — no manual API key handoff, no chargebacks. NinjaPay runs the first private facilitator: the agent's wallet, amount, and merchant are shielded.
- Where does payroll fit?
- DAOs and companies that pay contributors in stablecoins want payroll without doxxing every employee's salary on-chain. NinjaPay batches shielded payouts; the operator sees the aggregate, the employee sees their own claim. Tax withholding and 1099/W-2 export are first-class.
- When is mainnet?
- Devnet is open today. Mainnet access is by application — internal first, then design partners, then broader rollout. Five mainnet-blocking SLOs are tracked on the public status page; access expands once they hold for seven consecutive days under representative traffic.
- Is the program audited?
- Internal audit chain plus Stryker mutation testing covers the billing, router, auth, and payroll paths; CI publishes coverage on every PR. An external program-level audit is on the path to broader mainnet access — until then, mainnet stays application-gated.
- How does NinjaPay handle compliance?
- Privacy-by-default is paired with merchant-controlled compliance grants. A merchant signs a grant on-chain that releases viewing keys to a regulator or auditor for a specific time window. The audit log is hash-chained and tamper-evident; the grant itself doesn't move funds.
- What if Umbra goes down?
- The Umbra indexer + relayer are tracked health checks; we run circuit-breakers around every external call, and the scanner cursor / webhook DLQ have explicit alerts. Umbra is non-fronted — settlements are on Solana — but indexer outages do degrade live UTXO observation, which we surface on the public status page.