Self-hosted WooCommerce crypto payments, explained.
The architecture: a bridge, not a processor
PayRam for WooCommerce is deliberately thin. The plugin does not process payments, touch keys, or hold funds. When a buyer chooses crypto at checkout, your store calls your own PayRam gateway (POST /api/v1/payment, authenticated with your project API key) and receives a hosted checkout URL on your domain. The buyer pays on-chain. Your gateway then calls your store back on a webhook signed with HMAC-SHA256, and the WooCommerce order completes automatically. There is no polling, no third-party callback infrastructure, and no moment where the money passes through anyone but you.
No deposit keys on your web server
A hacked WordPress site is a fact of life on the internet. With PayRam it is not a treasury event: deposit keys never sit on the server. A family of smart contracts orchestrates fund movement directly on-chain, and every payment gets a unique deposit address, which also breaks transaction-graph linkage between your buyers. Compromising the store, or even the gateway machine, does not expose funds. This is the same no-keys-on-server architecture the rest of PayRam is built on.
How this differs from CoinGate, NOWPayments, and BitPay
Custodial WooCommerce plugins are a different product category. With CoinGate, NOWPayments, BitPay, or any hosted processor, your buyer pays into their wallet infrastructure; you receive a payout later, under their terms. That model requires an account (which can be reviewed, frozen, or closed), KYB onboarding, category restrictions on what you may sell, and your order and customer data living on their servers. PayRam removes the category, not the symptoms: there is no account, no custodian, no payout schedule, and no copy of your data anywhere but your own machine.
BTCPay Server deserves an honest mention: it is the original self-hosted gateway, and we respect it. The difference is scope. BTCPay is Bitcoin-first; PayRam is stablecoin-first (USDT and USDC across Ethereum, Tron, Base, and Polygon, plus BTC and ETH), with payouts, referral campaigns, card-to-crypto, AI-agent rails, and a multi-merchant operator mode in the same installation.
Built for stores that get deplatformed
If you sell in a category that payment companies rate as high-risk — iGaming, adult content, peptides and nutraceuticals, CBD, high-ticket digital goods, marketplaces in sanctioned-adjacent corridors — you have likely already lost a gateway account with funds inside it. PayRam was built for exactly this reality. What you sell and who your customers are is your business: the gateway runs on your server, reports to no one, and has no terms-of-service category list, because there is no counterparty to enforce one. That is equally true for ordinary stores that simply consider their sales data proprietary.
What it costs and what it needs
The plugin is free and open. The gateway runs on any VPS from roughly $20 to $150 per month, deploys with a one-line installer in about ten minutes, and charges no setup fee, no monthly fee, and no rolling reserve. Requirements: WordPress 6.0+, WooCommerce 6.0+, PHP 7.4+. The current plugin version (0.2.0) sends order amounts in USD, so set your store currency to USD; multi-currency FX is on the roadmap. It supports WooCommerce checkout blocks and High-Performance Order Storage out of the box.
The short version: every other plugin connects your store to someone else's payment company. This one connects it to infrastructure you own, and that single difference is where every other guarantee on this page comes from.
