Supporting twenty chains is a selling point right up until you have to decide which ones to actually show at checkout. Offer too few and you turn away customers who hold funds elsewhere. Offer too many and your checkout becomes a confusing wall of logos. The right answer comes from understanding what each network is good at and matching that to who your customers are.
The four variables that matter
Every network decision comes down to four things:
- Speed — how quickly a payment reaches final, fulfillable state.
- Fees — the network gas cost, which the customer or you ultimately bear.
- Liquidity — how much stablecoin actually circulates there, which determines whether your customers hold funds on it at all.
- Customer habit — the network your audience already uses, which beats every technical metric.
That last one is the quiet winner. The “best” chain on paper is useless if none of your customers keep money there.
A practical map of the major networks
Tron. The workhorse of real-world stablecoin payments, especially USDT. Fees are tiny and settlement is fast. If you sell internationally or to emerging markets, a large share of your customers already transact in USDT on Tron. Offer it.
Solana. Extremely fast, very cheap, with deep USDC liquidity and growing PYUSD support. Sub-second finality makes for a checkout that feels instant. Excellent default for a modern, performance-minded audience.
Base, Arbitrum, Optimism. Ethereum Layer-2 networks with low fees and strong USDC presence. They inherit Ethereum’s security and tooling while costing a fraction to use. Base in particular has become a popular on-ramp for newer users.
Ethereum mainnet. The most liquid and trusted chain, but also the most expensive and slowest at busy times. Worth offering for large payments where a few dollars of gas is irrelevant and the payer specifically wants mainnet — but rarely the right default for everyday checkout.
Polygon. Cheap, fast, broad token coverage, and familiar to a large existing user base.
The live, authoritative list — including which stablecoins are available on each — is the supported chains page. Use that, not this article, as the source of truth, since coverage changes.
How to actually choose
A simple, durable framework:
- Start with your customers. Where do they already hold stablecoins? International and USDT-heavy? Lead with Tron. Crypto-native and performance-minded? Lead with Solana and Base.
- Cover the big three liquidity centers. For most merchants that’s some combination of Tron, Solana, and an Ethereum L2 like Base. Those three reach the vast majority of stablecoin holders.
- Add Ethereum mainnet only if your order values are high. Its fees only make sense above a certain ticket size.
- Keep the list short. Three to five well-chosen networks convert better than fifteen. A shorter list is a clearer checkout.
Don’t offer every chain because you can. Offer the few your customers actually use, and present them in the order most of them will pick.
Speed, fees and the customer experience
Network choice also interacts with gas. On cheap, fast chains, gas-abstracted checkout is nearly free to provide; on Ethereum mainnet during congestion, abstraction is doing real work to keep the experience smooth. This is another reason to favor low-fee L2s and high-throughput chains as defaults: they make the whole flow cheaper and faster to operate.
Letting the gateway do the heavy lifting
With Plaidly you declare the chains and tokens a given payment session accepts, and the checkout renders them in a clean selector. The customer picks the one they already use; we handle confirmation thresholds, gas, and normalizing every payment to your single settlement currency. You can tune the offered set per session — a high-value invoice might add Ethereum mainnet, while a routine checkout sticks to Tron, Solana and Base.
The field-by-field details are in the API reference, and if you want a second opinion on the right network mix for your specific audience, support is happy to help you reason it through.
Twenty chains is a capability, not an instruction. The merchants who convert best treat the network list as a curated menu — a handful of options their customers were always going to choose anyway.