Buying proxies with crypto: coins, networks, confirmations and refunds

Plenty of people would rather buy proxies with crypto than put a card on file, and that is a perfectly reasonable preference. Paying from a wallet is quick once you have done it once. The first time, though, there are three ways to lose money that have nothing to do with the proxies: the wrong network, the wrong amount, and a refund address you cannot receive at.

This guide walks through one top-up paid in crypto, from picking a coin to getting unused balance back, and points at the exact places people trip.

Can you buy proxies with crypto here?

Yes. Crypto top-ups go through CoinGate and Cryptomus, which between them take BTC, ETH, USDT, USDC, LTC, SOL and ~70 more. The minimum top-up is $5, the balance never expires, and the unused part of a top-up is refundable within seven days, back to the wallet it came from, in the same coin.

Cards (Visa, Mastercard, Amex) work too. Everything below is about the wallet route, because that is the one with sharp edges.

A crypto top-up, step by step

1. Decide how much. Residential is billed per gigabyte at the rate attached to the top-up that funded it, and a bigger top-up buys a lower rate: from $5.50/GB for a single gigabyte down to $1.75/GB from 1,000 GB. ISP and datacenter addresses are charged per IP for their term. If you do not know how many gigabytes a job needs, measure the pages before you pay or run the numbers through the bandwidth calculator.
2. Pick crypto at checkout, then a coin, then a network. The processor’s payment page shows the amount of that coin to send and the address to send it to. That page is the whole instruction. Do not reuse an address or an amount from an earlier payment.
3. Send from a wallet you control, if you can. It makes the amount easier to get exactly right, and it is the only place a refund can land. More on both below.
4. Wait for confirmation. The balance appears once the processor sees the payment confirmed on-chain.
5. Keep the transaction hash until the balance shows up. It is the one thing support needs if anything goes sideways.

Which coin and which network should you pick?

A coin is what you send. A network is the blockchain it travels on. For Bitcoin, Litecoin or Solana those are the same thing. For stablecoins they are not: USDT and USDC each exist on several chains, and the same ten dollars of USDT on Tron and on Ethereum are, as far as the blockchains are concerned, two unrelated tokens.

The network decides three things: how long you wait, what the transfer costs you, and which coin you need to hold to pay that cost.

For a small top-up, a stablecoin on a cheap network is usually the least painful choice. The price does not move between the quote and your send, and the network fee is a small slice of the payment rather than a large one. Bitcoin works fine; it is just slower and costlier to move in small amounts.

What happens if you send on the wrong network?

The money arrives, just not anywhere the processor is looking. Recovering it depends on the processor and the chain, not on us, and sometimes it cannot be done. Treat the network field as the one field that can cost you the whole payment.

The trap is that many networks share an address format. A Tron address starts with a T, so a wallet will usually refuse to send Ethereum-network USDT to it. But Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, Polygon and other EVM chains all use the same 0x… addresses. Your wallet or exchange will happily send USDT on BNB Smart Chain to an address the payment page gave you for Ethereum, and nothing warns you.

So match the network name on the payment page against the network name on your withdrawal screen, word for word, before you press send. If it has already gone wrong, message us with the transaction hash straight away. The sooner the processor hears about it, the better the odds.

Pay the exact amount: underpayment and the exchange-fee trap

The payment page asks for a precise amount of the coin, converted from the dollar top-up you chose. Send exactly that. Processors generally treat a short payment as underpaid rather than quietly crediting a smaller balance, which leaves you waiting on a person to sort it out.

The usual ways people end up short:

• The exchange takes its fee out of the amount. Many exchanges subtract their withdrawal fee from the number you type, so the address receives less than you entered. Check whether yours shows “amount received” and set that one, or withdraw to your own wallet first and pay from there.
• Rounding. Some wallets trim decimals. Paste the amount rather than retyping it.
• Splitting the payment. Two sends that add up to the right total are two transactions, and each arrives on its own.
• Paying an old quote. Payment pages time out, and the conversion was done at a moment in time. If you left the page open while you fetched coins from somewhere, start a fresh one rather than paying a quote that may have lapsed.

If you did underpay, or overpay, do not fire off a second payment to make up the difference. Message us in Discord or at [email protected] with the transaction hash, and we will look at it with you.

How long does a crypto payment take to confirm?

The crypto card on our pricing page says it “Confirms in about a minute”. That holds on the fast chains in the table above. A Bitcoin payment waits for a block, and Bitcoin blocks arrive about every ten minutes on average, sometimes much longer when the network is busy. The processor may also wait for more than one confirmation before it calls a payment settled.

A payment with a fee set too low can sit unconfirmed for a long time. That is the chain, not the checkout. If your balance has not appeared and a block explorer shows the transaction still pending, the fix is on your side (many wallets can speed up or replace a stuck transaction). If the explorer shows it confirmed and the balance still has not moved, that is on our side and worth a message.

Where do the fees come from?

• The network fee. Paid by the sender, in the chain’s own coin, to the chain. It is not ours and we never see it. That is why a TRC-20 send needs TRX in the wallet and an ERC-20 send needs ETH.
• Your exchange’s withdrawal fee, if you pay from an exchange. Set by the exchange, and often larger than the network fee.
• The processor’s terms. CoinGate and Cryptomus set their own pricing. Anything that falls on you is shown on the payment page before you send, so read it there rather than trusting a percentage in a blog post.

The pricing page quotes one price list, not one per payment method, and it always has the current figures. Once a balance is paid for, its rate does not change, even if list prices do later; the terms say so.

How do crypto refunds work?

The refund policy is short, and it applies to crypto top-ups the same way it applies to cards:

• Ask within seven days of the top-up and you get the unused portion back. No reason needed.
• Using some of it does not void the rest. Top up $20.00, spend $7.50, and $12.50 is refundable.
• Crypto refunds go back to the wallet the payment was sent from, in the same coin, within three business days. Never as account credit, and never to another address, except the exchange case below.
• Payment processor fees on crypto are not refunded where the network fee has already been spent.
• After seven days the top-up stops being refundable, but the balance does not expire. It is still yours to spend.

The sending address matters more than people expect, because it is where a refund goes. If you paid from an exchange, the address that sent the coins probably belongs to the exchange, not to you. Show us the exchange’s withdrawal record for that payment and we will send the refund to a wallet you control instead. Without that record it goes to the sending address, and a refund sent there may never reach your account. That is the whole case for paying from a wallet you control, or at least keeping the withdrawal record. We may ask you to confirm the address before we send anything back.

A refund is paid in the coin you paid in: the same share of the coin we received as the share of the top-up’s dollar value you did not use, less the network fee for sending it back. In the example above that is 62.5% of the coin. It is counted in coin, not converted at today’s price, so if the coin has moved since you paid, the refund has moved with it. Questions before you ask for one go to Discord, and you will get a straight answer.

And a few things paying in crypto does not change:

• The same account rules apply. The terms still require that you are not barred from our services under sanctions law, and the acceptable use policy applies whatever you paid with.
• The meter is the same meter. Every request is logged with the bytes we billed, and you can check it against your own count with the bill audit guide.
• Top up small the first time. Enough for one static IP, or for the smallest residential order of 1 GB at $5.50, tells you whether a proxy line suits your target. If you are not sure which line that is, four questions pick one for you. The best residential rate needs a $1,750 order, which is not a first purchase.

Stuck on a payment? Paste the transaction hash (never your seed phrase or private key, which nobody legitimate will ever ask for) into Discord, and someone will look.