Terms of Service

Read this first

These Terms cover your use of GRCpay (the open-source software published at github.com/gridcat/grcpay) and any instance you reach through this site, including the demo at grcpay.gridcoin.club. By using the software, the public instance, the API, the WordPress / WooCommerce plugin, or any other component shipped under the GRCpay name, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use them.

Where the law requires capital letters or specific phrasing for enforceability, we have used them. Everywhere else we have tried to keep the language plain.

A passive facilitator

GRCpay is a small payment facilitator. It mints one-shot Gridcoin addresses, watches the public Gridcoin blockchain for incoming funds, and (if a recipient was specified) forwards those funds onward. We do not author, curate, moderate, or endorse the transactions that flow through addresses minted by this software.

On-chain payments are final

The Gridcoin blockchain is a permissionless, distributed ledger maintained by independent nodes worldwide. Once a transaction has been confirmed by the network, nobody (including the operators of this service) can rewrite, redact, or reverse it. Refunds, when they happen, are best-effort outbound transactions to the apparent sender. They are not chargebacks and they are not guaranteed.

What we are not

Neither the operator of the public instance nor the maintainers of the GRCpay software are, in any jurisdiction:

• a registered Money Services Business or money transmitter under the US Bank Secrecy Act, FinCEN regulations, or any state Money Transmitter regime;
• an authorised Crypto-Asset Service Provider (CASP) under EU Regulation 2023/1114 (MiCA), nor a legacy-VASP under any Member-State regime;
• a payment institution, e-money institution, or credit institution under PSD2/PSD3, EMD2, or any national equivalent;
• a registered cryptoasset business with the UK Financial Conduct Authority, a licensed digital payment token service provider with the Monetary Authority of Singapore, a FINMA-supervised Swiss financial intermediary, or a VARA-licensed UAE virtual asset service provider;
• a custodian, exchange, broker, dealer, market maker, escrow agent, settlement provider, or notary;
• a provider of legal, tax, accounting, or investment advice.

GRCpay is open-source software you can audit, fork, and run yourself. The public instance is a courtesy demo, not a regulated service.

The public instance

We run a public copy of GRCpay at https://grcpay.gridcoin.club/api as a courtesy, so people can try the protocol without standing up their own stack first. The live demo on this site uses the same instance, and the WordPress / WooCommerce plugin lets developers point it at the public instance during evaluation.

Production use is prohibited

The public instance is provided for evaluation, testing, demos, and small-scale personal experiments only. Production use of the public instance to accept real customer payments on a commercial basis is contrary to these Terms. Production use includes (without limitation): wiring the public instance into a live ecommerce checkout, invoicing, point-of-sale, donation page, or any other recurring revenue flow above hobbyist scale.

The operator may impose rate limits, volume caps, per-IP throttling, allowlists, or geographic restrictions on the public instance at any time and without notice, and may refuse, gate, or terminate any usage that resembles production. The operator may also retire the public instance entirely at any point. None of those actions create any liability toward you.

Before going to production, switch to a self-hosted GRCpay against your own Gridcoin wallet. The self-hosting guide is the canonical setup, not a fallback.

Custody & self-hosting

When you self-host GRCpay against a Gridcoin wallet you control, the service is non-custodial in the meaningful sense: customer funds never touch our wallet, our database, or our infrastructure. The keys, the wallet file, and any tradeoffs around hot/cold splits are entirely yours to manage.

When you point integrations at the public instance, funds briefly transit a wallet operated by us before being forwarded to the recipient address you specify. We make no representations about the security or longevity of that hot wallet, and we cannot reimburse losses arising from compromise, key loss, network failure, software bugs, or anything else. For production usage, follow the hot/cold wallet pattern on infrastructure you own.

Plugins & integrations

The WordPress / WooCommerce plugin and any other ecommerce integration we publish under the gridcat or gridcoin-community organisations are released under the MIT licence. The plugin's default configuration is “point at a GRCpay endpoint you operate” — not the public instance. Pointing a plugin install at the public instance for production checkout is contrary to these Terms (see above).

When you install a GRCpay plugin into your storefront, the plugin is a thin client that talks to whichever GRCpay endpoint you configure. Responsibility for AML, KYC, sanctions screening, Travel-Rule compliance, tax, accounting, customer service, and dispute handling lives with you as the merchant — not with the plugin authors and not with the maintainers of the GRCpay endpoint software.

Eligibility & sanctions

By using GRCpay or the public instance, you represent and warrant that:

• you are at least 18 years old (or the legal age of majority in your jurisdiction, whichever is greater);
• you are not a resident of, located in, or a national of any country or region subject to comprehensive sanctions imposed by the United Nations, European Union, United Kingdom, Switzerland, or United States, including but not limited to North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Syria, the Crimea region, and the so-called Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia People’s Republics;
• you are not listed on, or owned or controlled by a person listed on, any sanctions list maintained by the authorities above, including the OFAC SDN List, HM Treasury OFSI Consolidated List, and the EU Consolidated Sanctions List;
• using GRCpay is lawful in your jurisdiction; and
• you have full legal capacity to be bound by these Terms.

Prohibited use

You agree not to use GRCpay or the public instance:

• to send, receive, or facilitate payments involving any sanctioned person, entity, vessel, or jurisdiction;
• to process funds you know or reasonably suspect are proceeds of crime, of fraud, of corruption, of sanctions evasion, of human trafficking, or of any other criminal activity;
• to accept payment for goods or services that are illegal in any jurisdiction relevant to the transaction (yours, the customer’s, or any transit jurisdiction), including controlled drugs, unlicensed pharmaceuticals, weapons, child sexual abuse material, non-consensual intimate imagery, counterfeit goods, IP-infringing digital media sold as legitimate, hacking-as-a-service, malware, forged documents, identity documents, or trafficked human remains, organs, or labour;
• to operate an unregulated exchange, mixer, money transmitter, money services business, payment institution, e-money institution, gambling platform, or securities offering through GRCpay;
• to evade taxes, customs duties, or Travel-Rule / DAC8 / FATF Recommendation 16 obligations applicable to you;
• to launch, assist, or facilitate denial-of-service against the public instance, the Gridcoin network, any wallet daemon, fiat-rate provider, or any other dependency;
• to defraud, mislead, or extract value from the public instance’s hot wallet, including by creating wallets in volumes calculated to drain fee budgets, by replaying transactions, by exploiting timing windows, or by any other abuse of the API.

The operator may refuse, rate-limit, gate, or terminate any access for actual, suspected, or pattern-of-conduct violations of this section, with or without notice. The operator may also cooperate with valid legal process from competent authorities, including by freezing addresses, holding funds, and disclosing operational data the operator does have.

Your own legal obligations

GRCpay is a tool. Running it commercially (whether on the public instance during evaluation, on your own self-hosted instance in production, or anywhere in between) may bring obligations under the laws applicable to you. Those obligations sit with you. GRCpay does not perform any of the following on your behalf:

• customer identification (KYC) or beneficial-owner verification under EU AMLR, the US Bank Secrecy Act, the UK MLRs, or any other anti-money- laundering regime;
• sanctions screening of customer wallet addresses, counterparties, or transit routes against OFAC, EU, UK, UN, or other sanctions lists;
• Travel-Rule transmission of originator and beneficiary information under EU Regulation 2023/1113, FATF Recommendation 16, FinCEN’s Travel Rule, or any equivalent regime;
• crypto-asset reporting under EU Council Directive 2023/2226 (DAC8), the US 6045 broker reporting framework, or other tax-information-exchange regimes;
• VAT, sales tax, GST, withholding tax, or any other indirect or direct tax assessment, return, or remittance arising from your transactions;
• consumer-protection compliance, including refund, distance-selling, and dispute-resolution rules under EU consumer-protection law, the UK Consumer Rights Act, or equivalent national regimes;
• licensing, registration, or authorisation under any payment-services, e-money, money-transmitter, cryptoasset, gambling, or sectoral regulatory regime applicable to your activity.

See the legal overview for self-hosters for an orientation pass; that page is informational and is not legal advice.

Use at your own risk

Without limiting the foregoing, the operator disclaims any warranty that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure, free of malware, resilient against blockchain forks or reorganisations, or that any defect will be corrected. The operator does not warrant the operation, security, or continuity of the Gridcoin network, of any wallet software, of any explorer, fiat-rate provider, hosting provider, or any other third-party dependency.

No accuracy guarantee

We do not guarantee that wallet status, balances, exchange rates, QR codes, or any other data presented by GRCpay are correct, current, complete, or free from indexing errors, transient outages, chain-reorg artefacts, or upstream-API hiccups. Fiat-equivalent amounts in particular are derived from third-party pricing data, cached for several minutes, and can drift meaningfully from any market you care about.

Do not rely on GRCpay for financial, legal, accounting, tax, or operational decisions without independent verification. Cross-check anything that matters against a trusted Gridcoin full node before acting on it.

No liability

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, the operators, contributors, and hosts of this service shall not be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages (including, without limitation, lost funds, lost GRC, lost profits, lost data, lost case outcomes, lost opportunities, business interruption, or service disruption) arising out of or in connection with your use of, or inability to use, GRCpay or the public instance, even if advised of the possibility of such damages.

Without limiting the foregoing, the operator will not be liable for: (i) the acts or omissions of customers, merchants, or any other third party; (ii) loss of funds in transit on the Gridcoin network; (iii) failures, forks, reorgs, or attacks on the Gridcoin network; (iv) outages or errors of grcpay, stamp, the explorer, wallets, fiat-rate providers, hosting providers, or any other third-party tool; (v) consequences of your loss or compromise of private keys, wallet files, recipient addresses, or wallet tokens; (vi) consequences of rate-limiting, refusing, or terminating any usage of the public instance, including production use contrary to these Terms.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud, fraudulent misrepresentation, or any non-waivable consumer-protection right under the law of your habitual residence. You access and use the service at your sole risk and are solely responsible for any loss or harm that may result.

No financial advice

Nothing on this site or returned by the API constitutes financial, investment, trading, tax, legal, or any other form of professional advice. GRC/fiat exchange rates, wallet balances, QR codes, and lifecycle states are presented for informational and operational purposes only. You are solely responsible for any decisions you make using this information, including any decision to accept GRC as payment in the first place.

Indemnification

You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless the operator, the GRCpay maintainers, the gridcoin.club family contributors, and their respective agents from and against any claim, demand, investigation, proceeding, loss, damage, cost, or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or relating to: (a) your use of GRCpay or the public instance; (b) any content or data you submit through the API or the plugin; (c) any transaction you enter into through GRCpay; (d) your breach of these Terms; (e) your violation of any law, regulation, or third-party right; or (f) any tax, customs, AML, sanctions, or licensing liability arising from your activity.

The operator may, at its option, take exclusive control of the defence and settlement of any claim subject to this section; you will cooperate. You will not settle any claim that imposes any obligation on the operator without the operator’s written consent.

User-supplied data

Callers supply the recipient address, the amountRequired, and any other order-shaped fields when creating a wallet. We do not validate that a recipient address belongs to anyone in particular, and once funds have been forwarded to the address you provided, the transaction is on-chain and final. Funds sent to a mistyped, hostile, or otherwise wrong recipient cannot be recovered by us.

Third-party services

GRCpay interfaces with third-party software (the Gridcoin Research wallet, fiat-rate providers such as CoinGecko, hosting providers, analytics, and others). Their availability, behaviour, and licensing terms are governed by their own publishers; we make no representations about them and accept no responsibility for their conduct or output.

Governing law

These Terms, and any dispute arising out of them or out of your use of GRCpay or the public instance, are governed by the laws of [Operator’s principal place of business], without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. The courts of [Operator’s principal place of business] have exclusive jurisdiction.

If you are a consumer habitually resident in the European Union, the United Kingdom, or another jurisdiction whose consumer-protection law cannot lawfully be displaced by contract, you also retain the protections of the mandatory law of your residence and may bring claims in the courts of your residence to the extent that law requires.

Changes

These Terms may be updated from time to time. The current version is always the one served at this URL, with the effective date below. Your continued use of GRCpay or the public instance after a change constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms.

Contact

General queries, abuse reports, IP-infringement notices, lawful-process correspondence, and DSA Article 11 / 12 / 16 contact for the public instance: [email protected]. The operator accepts service of process and authority correspondence in English at this address.