Glossary · moving money
What is a mass payout?
A mass payout is one instruction that pays many recipients. Affiliate commissions, creator earnings, rebates, contest prizes, contractor invoices. The difficulty is never the payment, it is doing hundreds of them without a person checking each one.
Why volume changes the problem entirely
One payment is a transaction. Four hundred payments is an operation, and the costs that matter stop being the fee per transfer.
They become: how long someone spends assembling the list, how many recipients gave you the wrong details, what happens when payment 217 of 400 fails, whether you can prove afterwards who got paid what, and who is allowed to press the button.
Traditional rails handle this badly across borders. Per-hop fees multiply by recipient, business days multiply by time zone, and a bank that stops one payment for a question stops it silently.
Which is why mass payouts are the crypto payments use case with the least argument attached to it. The saving is arithmetic rather than ideological, and it grows with the number of recipients.
Compare
Four ways to pay a lot of people
Pick by how you get the recipient details, not by volume.
| Method | Right when | Recipient details needed |
|---|---|---|
| Dashboard, one at a time | A handful of payments, no file | Wallet address and network |
| CSV upload | Dozens to thousands, from a finance process | Wallet address and network for every row |
| API | Continuous, driven by your own system | Wallet address and network, held by you |
| Payout links | You only have email addresses | An email address. The recipient supplies the rest |
The last row is the one most affiliate programmes should look at first, because collecting and storing wallet addresses is the step that generates the errors.
What a mass payout tool has to do
Three requirements, and only the first is about sending money.
Take a file or an API call
CSV upload for finance teams, API for platforms. Both should validate the fields before anything moves.
Frequently asked questions
How many recipients is a mass payout?
There is no threshold. It is the point where doing them one at a time stops being sensible, which for most teams is somewhere in the dozens.
Do I need to code?
No. CSV upload runs from the dashboard with no engineering. The API is there when you want it automated. Both workflows
What if a recipient gives me the wrong address?
That row fails rather than the batch. And the better answer is not to collect addresses: with a payout link the recipient enters their own.
Can a batch pay several different assets?
Yes. Each row can name its own asset and network, so one file can settle affiliates who all want something different. What you hold and what you send do not have to match. How FX payouts work