NOWPayments has not confirmed where its volume settles
TRON DAO says 40% of NOWPayments volume runs on TRON. The company has not published that split, and its own payout file cuts the chains a different way.
The chain under a NOWPayments checkout is not settled by a social post. On September 26, 2026, TRON's Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO) wrote that 40% of payment volume on NOWPayments runs through TRON. That line is a claim. The only chain-share file the company has published measures a different flow: six months of enterprise payouts, in which TRON carried 43.69% of monetary volume and 15.73% of transfers, while BNB Smart Chain carried 48.23% of transfers and 21.75% of the money. Counting dollars and counting tickets pick different rails.
A check of the NOWPayments blog, its August pricing note and the pages that list supported networks did not turn up the 40% figure, a window or a denominator. The sentence is in the September 26 TRON DAO post, which quotes a September 25 post from NOW Wallet, another ChangeNOW product. ChangeNOW launched NOWPayments. The wallet attributes the share to "NOWPayments data" and attaches no table. On September 22 the official NOWPayments account did not repeat the 40% line. It pointed merchants to the payout benchmark and highlighted Solana's speed, not a TRON share of all payments.
The payout file is a different series
That benchmark is the file that can be checked. In a Chainwire release dated September 21, 2026, linked from the NOWPayments blog on September 25, the company said it had analysed six months of enterprise payouts across TRON, BNB Smart Chain, Solana (SOL), Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). Those five networks accounted for 94.04% of payout volume and 77.84% of payout transactions. TRON moved 43.69% of payout volume, more than twice BNB Smart Chain's 21.75%, on a much smaller share of tickets. The release puts the average TRON payout at about 6.2 times the average BNB Smart Chain payout. Ethereum was 18.84% of volume, Bitcoin 6.68%, and Solana 3.08%, with Solana the fastest at one minute and 45 seconds. None of that is checkout volume. The 43.69% and the claimed 40% are not the same series, and they are not the same number.
A checkout can use more than one chain
The split matters because NOWPayments is a merchant settlement rail, not a single-chain processor. A merchant can take one asset in and send another out. On August 28, 2026 the company restated its standard rates at 1% for single-currency payments and 1.5% for multi-currency payments, with custom offers as low as 0.3% and only for eligible businesses. The same note added the dollar stablecoin USD1 on five networks: BNB Smart Chain, Solana, Ethereum, TRON and Aptos. Partners pay an external wallet or a ChangeNOW Pro email payout that credits a ChangeNOW account. Dashboard payouts sit behind an IP whitelist, and a new address needs two-factor authentication. Neither update ranks chains by incoming payment volume. BNB Smart Chain, TRON and Solana are options a treasurer picks per flow, the same coin-and-network split behind HIFI's push into repo and cards.
"The useful question is not which network tops a leaderboard. It is what a specific payout flow needs to optimize: value, frequency, speed, or cost," said Kate Lifshits, commercial director at NOWPayments.
For a treasurer, the chain is the constraint that an invoice does not show. The payout file makes TRON the candidate for a large outgoing ticket, because the money sits there and the count sits on BNB Smart Chain. A policy that reads the September 26 post and treats TRON as the NOWPayments rail will understate that load: BNB Smart Chain handled nearly half of payout tickets in the six-month set. J.P. Morgan Payments' link to Thunes widens where a payout can land. It does not make every corridor the same size. Interactive Brokers' stablecoin rail leaves Tether (USDT) out even where USDT is the coin many merchants receive. A card network that adds on-chain credit, as Visa has done for stablecoin card settlement, still has to name the chain the obligation sits on.
What a published checkout split would change
What happens next is a disclosure choice, not a price path. If NOWPayments publishes a checkout-volume split with a window, a denominator and a chain list, the September 26 claim can be confirmed or retired against its own books. Until that file exists, the 40% line cannot be used as a concentration figure for merchant settlement. Payout files drive wallet whitelists, fee budgets and which stablecoin a recipient can spend. A social post does not. Routing mass payouts by ticket size, not by one preferred chain, is what the commercial director described. The missing series is whether incoming NOWPayments volume follows that file.
This article is informational analysis only and is not financial, investment, or trading advice. Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile and can lose substantial value rapidly. Past performance and historical patterns do not guarantee future results. Do your own research and consult a regulated financial adviser before making any investment decision.
Reporting by Karthik Subramanian. Filed 30 September 2026, 11:46 GMT.
Digital Assets Correspondent
Karthik Subramanian is a founder, writer, and technology consultant with nine years in the crypto ecosystem.
