Paying contractors in USDC or USDT: the cost, the risks, the books

Etherscan's gas tracker at 16:04 UTC on 26 September 2026 showed average gas at 0.092 gwei, ETH at $2,691.70, a USDT transfer at $0.013 (54,128 gas) and any other ERC-20 transfer at $0.016 (65,000 gas). A plain ETH transfer uses 21,000 gas, which is why it costs less than a token.

Gas moves with congestion, so that is one afternoon's figure, not a promise. Base, Arbitrum and Polygon share the same 0x address and keep separate books, each with its own gas market; Orla's run screen shows the day's estimate before you send.

The base fee is 5,000 lamports per signature, paid in SOL, with an optional priority fee on top. A recipient who has never held the token needs a token account opened for them, about 0.002 SOL once, and Orla shows it in the preview.

A wallet that holds only USDC cannot move it until it holds a little SOL, and Orla says so before you confirm.

A transfer spends bandwidth and energy. Each account gets a small free bandwidth allowance a day; energy has none, and when stake and quota do not cover an operation the network burns TRX from the sender.

So a wallet paying USDT on TRON needs TRX as well, and not enough TRX for energy is a different problem from not enough USDT: Orla names which one it is.

The contractor pays to turn tokens into money: an exchange, a withdrawal, their bank. The blog's worked example lands near 0.2% of the amount done well and several percent done carelessly.

The same ticker is a different token on another chain, and money sent to the wrong one is gone. In Orla the account you pay from decides which of the contact's addresses can be used at all: a TRON wallet offers TRON addresses, an Ethereum wallet the EVM ones.

A Solana token account pasted instead of a wallet address is refused with an explanation.

Poisoned addresses copy the first and last characters of one you know. A recipient that looks like a contact but differs in the middle is held before the send, with the contact it resembles named under the row. The confirmation shows the address in full, never shortened, and says when you have never sent to it before.

Before sending, the run reads the wallet's balance and what one transaction costs, then pays down the list until either runs out. A run that is 60% funded pays 60% of the people; the rest stay approved and go out after a top-up, with no second round of signatures.

A TRON transfer out of energy, a Solana error, a reverted EVM transaction: the expense comes off the books, the payment returns to approved with a note, everyone who may sign is told, and it can be sent again with the signatures it already has.

A payment shows sent, awaiting the network, once broadcast, and becomes executed when the block confirms. If nothing confirms within an hour it is flagged, and the owners are told to check the wallet before paying again.

A row with an unknown outcome stays blocked in the run until the chain answers, so silence never turns into a second payment.

The moment a run starts a row, the queue reads Being sent instead of offering Pay now. Submitting the same draft twice returns the same batch, and a row repeating a payment to the same contact for the same amount within three days is flagged before you submit.

There is no chargeback and no bank to phone. Everything Orla does about this happens before the send, not after it.

Circle's USDC terms, last updated 12 December 2025, describe a blocklisting policy and say Circle may be required to freeze USDC when it receives a legal order from a valid government authority. That is rare for a payroll, and it is real: the address you pay to matters.

Orla screens a crypto address before you pay it: the verdict comes back as Low risk, High risk or Blacklisted, with the provider's reasons. A blacklisted destination holds the Send button until a person ticks Send despite the blacklist; a high-risk score is a loud warning and never blocks.

Approving a crypto payment queues the payee's screening on its own, so the answer is usually there by the time somebody sends. Checks are counted per plan and carry over month to month.

In the United States the GENIUS Act, enacted on 18 July 2025, sets who may issue a payment stablecoin and how it must be backed. Whether you may pay a contractor in a given country in USDT, and how to report it, is a question for a local adviser and your accountant.

The paperwork about the person does not change with the rail: a W-9 or a W-8BEN describes the payee, not the money.

A contractor's card keeps a wallet address per network, with one marked default. A batch draws from one wallet and pays in its own coin or a token it holds, up to 200 rows, from a CSV if you like; the approval rule checks the total, and Sign batch approves every row in one action.

The payment shows its transaction id linked to the block explorer, and under it what the network actually charged, read off the chain after it settled. The fee is also its own row in the transaction list, named Network fee, in SOL, TRX or ETH, so cashflow agrees with how much the wallet went down by.

A period of the ledger leaves as double-entry journal lines in a CSV that Xero and QuickBooks import: the amount that moved, its value in your base currency at that day's rate, and the rate itself.

A crypto disposal posts three lines, the proceeds, the cost basis leaving the books and the realised gain or loss on its own line, because the accounting system never saw which lots were consumed. A disposal with no account code for that gain stops the export rather than handing over an entry that does not balance.

A USDT payout from a book kept in euros is still a disposal of USDT, priced at that day's rate against the lots it consumed, so the book sees a small realised difference on a coin that never left the dollar. It is the same number the Tax center shows.

The month leaves as one archive: the journal, a statement per account, the payments with who proposed and who signed, and the crypto disposals by lot with the cost basis, proceeds, gain, holding period and hash.

Before that, Book against chain puts what the ledger says a wallet holds next to what the address actually holds, and the cost basis method, FIFO, LIFO or HIFO, is chosen once and free on every plan.