Genies Pay / In the hand / Crypto
"Crypto payments" is four products wearing one word. They have different risks, different regulators and different answers to the question "who is holding the asset right now". Here they are separately.
The merchant never touches the asset unless they ask to. A quote is struck, the customer sends, and the merchant's account is credited in local currency at the quoted rate.
The terminal or the QR carries an amount in local currency. A rate is struck and held for a stated window.
The customer's app signs and broadcasts. The amount sent is the quoted amount, not an approximation.
The payment waits for the confirmations the asset requires. The counter sees "confirming", not "approved".
The merchant's account is credited in local currency. The conversion happened on our side of the counter.
The honest part: a card payment is approved in under a second and a crypto payment is not. Confirmation time belongs to the network, not to us. For a queue at a till that matters, and the counter staff need to be told what "confirming" means before the first one happens.
Balances in the app are held by the institution on the customer's behalf. The customer has a claim, not a private key. That is a different product from a self-custody wallet and should never be described as the same thing.
Customer assets segregated from the institution's own, reconciled against on-chain holdings on a schedule, and operated under the virtual-asset licence for the territory. Cold storage policy and withdrawal approvals are part of the deployment, not an afterthought.
| Action | What happens | What the customer is told |
|---|---|---|
| Deposit | An address is issued for that balance; funds credit after the required confirmations | How many confirmations remain, on screen |
| Hold | The balance sits alongside the fiat balances in the same list | That the value moves, and that it is custodial |
| Convert | Sold into a fiat balance at a quoted rate with a held window | The rate, the spread, and the clock |
| Withdraw | Sent to an address after screening | Network fee, screening outcome, and that it cannot be recalled |
The terminal knows nothing about any of this. It sends an ordinary authorisation in local currency; what happens behind it is our problem, not the merchant's.
AED 84.00 at Cedar Grocery. An ordinary card authorisation, in local currency.
Enough of the crypto balance to cover AED 84.00 is quoted at that instant.
The crypto leg sells; the fiat leg funds the card. The statement shows both, with the rate.
In local currency, on the normal settlement cycle. Nothing about the funding source reaches them.
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Cedar Grocery · contactless | AED 84.00 |
| Funded from | USDC balance |
| Rate applied | 1 USDC = 3.6721 AED |
| Crypto leg | 22.874 USDC |
| Spread | 0.45% |
Illustrative figures. A refund arrives days later at a different price — the statement says so, and the customer is credited in fiat unless they ask for the asset back.
This one is not a consumer feature at all. It is what moves between the institutions after everything above has happened: net positions settled over a stablecoin rail instead of a correspondent chain, where both ends are licensed to do it.
Clearing, netting and settlement are the switch's job. The rail is an option inside it, not a separate product — T-NET Acquiring Route is where that story is told properly, including the reconciliation and the chargeback handling that has to survive it.
It is on this page because it is the fourth thing people mean when they say "crypto payments", and leaving it out would make the other three look like the whole answer.
A card payment can be charged back for months. An on-chain transfer cannot be recalled at all. Any product that puts the two together has to decide who carries that gap, and say so before the first dispute, not during it.
Between quote and confirmation the price moves. That is why every quote here has a stated window and re-prices rather than expiring quietly into a worse rate.
Congestion and fees belong to the network. The product can show what is happening; it cannot make a block arrive sooner, and no amount of interface design changes that.
Address screening and sanctions checks on both directions, travel-rule data where thresholds apply, and source-of-funds on the way in. Which of these four products can be offered at all is decided by the licence, not by the platform.
Onboarding, paying, the record, security and Arabic.
Balances, five ways in, conversion with the clock, the ledger.
Virtual, digital and physical, currency cards, and the controls.
And the other half of the site is the counter this money arrives at — Smart POS, QR, the SDKs and attestation.