There's a moment every marketplace hits where payments stop being simple. Taking $100 from a buyer is easy. Making sure $92 reaches the right seller, $8 stays with you, and there's a clean record of both — across hundreds of sellers, every day — is where it gets real. Get it wrong and you're either paying people by spreadsheet or building a ledger you never signed up to build.
This is exactly the problem the Platform API exists for, and it does it in crypto.
One key, every seller
You don't manage a separate set of credentials per seller. You operate with one API key and reference each seller by their account ID. When a buyer pays, you tell us who to credit and what your commission is, and the split happens on its own when the payment confirms.
Concretely: a buyer pays $100, you've set a 5% + $0.50 commission. The moment the chain confirms, your seller's balance gets their share and yours gets $5.50 — in one atomic step, no nightly reconciliation job, no manual transfers. The commission is capped at the seller's net, so a fat-fingered fee can never push a seller into the red.
Where it fits
If any of these sound like you, it's built for your shape of business:
- A digital-goods or services marketplace taking a cut of each sale.
- A gig or freelance platform paying a long tail of providers.
- A creator platform splitting revenue with the people making the content.
If you just sell your own products, you don't need any of this — a standard account already pays you. The platform piece is specifically for when you're collecting on behalf of other people.
Keeping the books straight
Collecting the money is half the job; proving it is the other half, and it's the half that bites at tax time. Every on-behalf order fires a signed order.completed webhook to your endpoint, separate from the seller's own. You get a live commission statement — every order, every seller, every cut — and you can export the lot to CSV when your accountant asks. No screenshotting a dashboard at month-end.
Getting started
Apply for a platform account from your dashboard; approval is instant and you keep your normal account for your own sales. Each seller hands you their account ID once, and from then on you charge against it with your single key. The docs have the exact create-on-behalf call, and the platform overview walks the money flow with worked numbers.
Marketplaces are payments businesses whether they planned to be or not. You may as well run that part on rails built for it. Open an account and apply.