What is Onchain Rail and why does it exist?
Most payment infrastructure treats the blockchain as an afterthought. Onchain Rail inverts that — the contract is the authoritative settlement layer, and the off-chain service is its gatekeeper.
Traditional payment systems settle through opaque, centralized rails. You trust a counterparty to move money correctly, log it accurately, and handle disputes fairly. There's no public audit trail, and reversals are expensive and slow.
Onchain Rail takes a different approach. The USDC escrow contract on Base Mainnet is the settlement layer. Every payout, refund, and dispute resolution is an on-chain transaction — publicly verifiable, permanently recorded, and governed by immutable contract logic.
The off-chain lifecycle service acts as the gatekeeper. It evaluates delivery conditions, checks authorization guards, and decides whether a settlement should be released, refunded, or escalated. Nothing moves on-chain without its approval. This gives you programmable, rule-based settlement without sacrificing operator control.
The current Phase 28 deployment is production-shaped: the contract is deployed and source-verified on Basescan, the sidecar service integrates with the smart contract via a typed Python client, and the deployment is fully documented. Live user funds aren't enabled yet — that gate opens after all external reviews pass.