Plenty of businesses don't keep every dollar they take in. A reseller passes part of each sale to the maker, an affiliate earns a cut of the customers they send, and co-founders split the income of a side project. With card payments, this usually means a spreadsheet and a bank transfer at the end of the month. With crypto, the split can happen as part of the payment itself. This guide explains how revenue splits work, what they cost in network fees, and what to agree with your partners first.
What a revenue split is
A revenue split is a standing rule: for every payment you receive, a set percentage belongs to someone else. Instead of collecting everything and paying partners later, the payment system sets each partner's share aside as payments come in and sends it to the partner's own wallet.
Splits are different from payouts. A payout is a one-off transfer you decide to make. A split is automatic and recurring: once a partner is set up, every new payment is split the same way until you change or stop it.
Who uses revenue splits
| Business | Who gets a share | Typical setup |
|---|---|---|
| Reseller or white-label service | The original maker or supplier | A fixed percentage of every sale |
| Affiliate or referral partner | The person or site that sent the customer | A percentage, often for a single product line or store |
| Co-founders and partners | Each owner | Shares that match the ownership agreement |
| Agency or freelancer collective | Members, or the agency for its fee | A fee percentage plus the rest to the member |
| Creator and collaborator | A co-author, editor or platform | A percentage of every sale of a shared product |
Marketplaces are a different case
A marketplace where each order belongs to a different seller needs a different amount sent to a different person on each sale. A split rule that applies the same percentages to every payment doesn't fit that well. Marketplaces usually collect payments, keep records per seller and send per-seller payouts on a schedule. Splits work best for a small number of long-term partners who share in everything a store earns.
Paying partners by hand vs automatic splits
Both approaches work. They differ in how much effort and trust they need:
- By hand. You receive everything, add up each partner's share at the end of the month, and send it. It is flexible, but it takes time, partners have to trust your sums, and every transfer is another chance to paste a wrong address.
- Automatic. Each partner's percentage is set aside on every paid payment and sent to an address the partner gave once. Partners get paid without waiting for you, and the amounts follow directly from the payments.
Automatic splits suit stable arrangements with clear percentages. Arrangements with bonuses, thresholds or per-product rates are often easier to handle by hand, at least until they settle down.
Batching and network fees
Every blockchain transfer pays a network fee. The ethereum.org guide to gas explains how this works on Ethereum, and every other network has its own version. The fee is charged per transfer, not per dollar, so it weighs most on small amounts.
Picture a partner with a 5% share of a $20 sale. Their share is about a dollar. Sending it on its own costs a fee that, on a busy network, can be a large part of that dollar or more. Add a hundred such sales together, and one transfer carries a hundred shares for the price of one fee.
- Batch shares per coin and send them once they add up to a useful amount, or after a fixed time so nobody waits forever.
- Ask partners for addresses on low-fee networks where you can, such as Tron, Solana, Polygon or Base. Our guide to crypto network fees compares them.
- Agree whether the partner's payout pays its own network fee, or you cover it.
Refunds, stopping a partner and agreements
The hard questions about splits are not technical. They are about what happens when things change, and they belong in a written agreement before the first payment is split.
- Refunds. If a customer gets their money back, does the partner give back their share? Shares that were already set aside or paid are hard to claw back automatically. Decide whether you deduct refunded shares from future ones, absorb them, or set a limit.
- Ending the arrangement. Stopping a partner should stop new splits from a clear date, and shares earned before that date should still be paid.
- Addresses. The partner is responsible for giving addresses they control, on the right networks. A payout to a wrong address can't be reversed.
- Taxes and reporting. Who reports the income, and in which country? That depends on where you and your partners are, and it is worth asking an accountant.
Our guide on how to refund a crypto payment covers refunds from the customer's side.
How revenue splits work on Crypto Merchant
Revenue splits are built into Crypto Merchant. Admins set them up under Settings, after confirming it's them with a fresh code from their email or authenticator app.
- Add up to 10 partners. Together they can get at most 90%.
- Each partner has a name, a percentage, and their own wallet address for each type of network you want split: EVM, Tron, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Solana, TON (with a memo if needed) and the XRP Ledger (with a tag if needed). Crypto Merchant addresses are refused.
- On every paid payment, each partner's percentage of what you get after the 1% fee is set aside for them.
- Coins on a network the partner gave no address for are not split, and stay with you.
- A split fee of 0.5% is taken from each share.
- Shares are paid to the partner in batches, one per coin, once they add up to $10 or once the oldest share has waited a week. Each partner payout pays its own network fee.
An example
Say you have one partner at 10%, and a customer pays an invoice of 200 USDT on Tron. You receive 200 USDT minus the 1% payment fee. 10% of what you receive is set aside for the partner, and the 0.5% split fee comes out of their share. The rest of the payment stays in your balance. The partner's USDT waits with their other shares on Tron until the batch is sent to the Tron address they gave.
Stopping, refunds and records
Stopping a partner stops new splits, and shares already set aside are still paid. A refund doesn't take back shares already set aside. Partner payouts appear under Payouts as Partner share, and in the API and webhooks they carry partner_share set to true. The payouts docs have the full details.
Records and taxes
Splits make record-keeping easier, because every share is tied to the payment it came from. On Crypto Merchant, the Tax CSV under Reports lists every payment, payout, refund, partner share and swap for the period you choose, with fees and transaction IDs, in the Koinly universal CSV layout. Payments are valued in US dollars at the rate when they were paid. You can hand the file to your accountant or import it into a crypto tax tool, and partners can match their payouts against the transaction IDs on their own explorer.
How shares are taxed depends on where you and your partners live and how your arrangement is set up. None of this is tax advice. If you are new to taking crypto at all, start with how to accept crypto payments.