Retail payments
QR-first checkout: the terminal displays a signed payment request, the customer scans and approves, and the merchant sees final settlement in seconds — no interchange stack in the middle.
Pillar 01 · Payments and Settlement
Paid means paid
Permissionless, irreversible POLA payments with deterministic finality in seconds — for people, merchants, institutions, and the software that acts for them.
Polaris treats settlement as the product, not a by-product. A payment is authorized in real time, final on-ledger in seconds, and never subject to a ledger-level chargeback. Fees are flat and published. And because fees can be sponsored, the person or program paying may never need to hold POLA at all.
Deterministic finality — no takebacks
A committed payment is final in one to five seconds. There are no ledger-level chargebacks and no reversal windows. Refunds still exist — as explicit, voluntary payments from the merchant referencing the original receipt: visible, auditable, and on the merchant's own terms, like handing cash back across the counter.
Permissionless by design
Native POLA payments are permissionless. Settlement is credibly neutral: stake-based BFT validators propose blocks in parallel, so no single leader sits in the payment path. Compliance rules exist on Polaris — but they apply to issued assets and registered records, which carry their own rules, not to the native payment layer.
Humans and software pay the same rails
A person scans a QR code; a software agent consumes the same signed payment request — amount, recipient, memo, expiry — programmatically. Flat, published fees mean software can budget costs exactly, and deterministic finality means an automated system can act the moment a payment lands.
Fee sponsorship: the fee is not the user's problem
Merchants, platforms, and payment operators can sponsor network fees on behalf of end users — much as merchants absorb card interchange today — or a dedicated paymaster can cover them, so a payer may never need to hold POLA to transact.
No gas auctions
Fees are a flat, published schedule — a base fee plus a per-byte fee. You know the exact cost before you send, every time.
No POLA required to pay
Fee sponsorship means consumers — and the software acting for them — may never need to hold the network token to transact.
Finality in seconds
Deterministic settlement, not probabilistic confirmation. When Polaris says paid, it is paid.
Where it applies
Built for real-world use
Merchant settlement
Funds settle directly to the merchant with no chargeback exposure. Refunds are explicit signed payments referencing the original receipt — auditable by design, on the merchant's own terms.
Business payments
B2B invoices settle in seconds instead of days, with a flat fee known before sending and a permanent, timestamped record of every payment.
Cross-border and remittances
Value moves across borders at ledger speed with deterministic finality and predictable cost — no correspondent-banking chain, no multi-day float.
Institutional settlement
Settlement desks get atomic delivery-versus-payment against tokenized assets, and witnessed escrow for trades that need protection before settlement — with the same fast, deterministic finality.