How Varnir compares
Varnir is on public testnets and not yet in production, so the providers below are further along commercially. Claims about other companies come from their own public pages as of 2 September 2026, cited inline. Pricing in this market changes often, so treat this page as a starting point for your own diligence. Anything a provider does not publish is marked "not publicly disclosed".
Why this page exists, and what it is not
Pricing describes Varnir's own fee mechanism without saying what anyone else charges. This page fills that gap for procurement-style comparison, with one rule: only stated facts — fee structures, custody models, chains supported, stage of development. No claims about anyone's reliability, security posture or quality, because those are not sourceable.
It is also not a "why Varnir wins" page. Varnir is a testnet with one thesis. Each section below has a "Where the other party is ahead" line, and on the axes that matter most to a buyer today — being live, being licensed, having support — that line is longer than the Varnir one nearly everywhere.
Who is actually comparable
Varnir's shape is specific: a settlement layer with business identities, assigned L1 deposit wallets, invoicing, HMAC webhooks, a signing SDK, and L1 keys that no single machine stores whole. Very few companies overlap on all of those, so the comparison is split by which axis each company shares.
| Company | Shares which axis with Varnir |
|---|---|
| Bridge (a Stripe company) | Stablecoin orchestration API for developers; deposit addresses and programmatic movement |
| Circle | Wallet infrastructure as a developer product, MPC-based key handling, published per-unit pricing |
| BVNK | Regulated stablecoin payment infrastructure for businesses receiving and sending value, including in the EU |
| Fireblocks | The custody claim itself — MPC key shares where the provider cannot sign alone |
| Request Finance | Invoicing and AP/AR as the product surface, with a fully published self-serve rate card |
Two candidates were researched and excluded, with reasons given in what was looked at and left out at the end.
Bridge (a Stripe company)
What it is. Bridge's own site lists four products: Orchestration ("move money with stablecoins"), Issuance ("issue your own stablecoin"), Cards ("stablecoin-backed cards") and Wallets ("securely hold stablecoins"). Stripe announced completion of its acquisition of Bridge on its own newsroom; Stripe's crypto documentation now lists Bridge as a partner for "global stablecoin orchestration and open issuance."
Pricing: not publicly disclosed. Stated carefully, because third-party
articles quote specific numbers for Bridge that could not be confirmed at
source. As of 2 September 2026, bridge.xyz/pricing returns a 404,
no fee schedule appears on the Bridge home page, and the Bridge API
documentation's
developer fees page
describes only how you charge your users — fixed or percentage fees withheld
from the customer's amount and paid out monthly. It does not state what Bridge
charges you. The
transaction minimums page
uses a 1% developer fee as a worked example, which is an illustration and not a
Bridge rate.
The same applies to Stripe's own stablecoin acceptance. A 1.5% flat fee is widely repeated in third-party write-ups; it does not appear on Stripe's stablecoin product page, on stripe.com/pricing, or in Stripe's crypto docs index, all checked on the same date. This page will not repeat a number about a real company that the company does not publish.
Custody. Not stated in the material reviewed. Bridge's site carries money transmission disclosures — Bridge Building Inc, NMLS 2450917 for US residents, and Bridge Building S.A., RCS Luxembourg B298785 for the EEA — which is the disclosure shape of a regulated intermediary rather than of a non-custodial protocol.
Where Varnir differs. Varnir's identity key never reaches a Varnir server and every ledger transaction is signed locally and POSTed directly to a chain node, not relayed through a Varnir API (the introduction covers this). Varnir also publishes an illustrative fee model down to example constants, even though no fee runs on-ledger today.
Where Bridge is ahead. Production, at scale, on mainnet, inside the largest payments company that has ever bought a stablecoin business. Regulatory registrations in the US and EEA. Card issuance, stablecoin issuance and fiat rails, none of which Varnir has in any form.
Circle
What it is. The USDC issuer, and separately a developer platform. On the axis that matters here — programmable wallets — Circle publishes an unusual amount of detail.
Pricing: published, and granular. Circle's wallets page states pay-as-you-go pricing per Monthly Active Wallet, free for the first 1,000 each month, then $0.050 each from 1,001 wallets, tiering down to $0.020 each above 250,001. A $0.01 monthly rebate applies to wallets holding at least 10 USDC.
For cross-chain movement, Circle's CCTP fees documentation states that Standard Transfers are free and that Fast Transfers carry a protocol fee of 0 to 13 basis points depending on source chain — 1 bps on Ethereum and Solana, 13 bps on Linea at the top of the published range — deducted from the transferred amount at mint on the destination chain.
Custody. Circle's wallets page describes two models: user-controlled ("enable end users to sign transactions directly and maintain control over their funds") and developer-controlled ("sign transactions and custody funds for internal operations or on behalf of end users"). The stated technology is MPC, described as splitting a private key into components distributed across multiple parties.
Chains. The all-included tier lists Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, Monad, OP Mainnet, Polygon PoS, Solana and Unichain, with the Signing API extending to any EVM-compatible chain plus NEAR.
Where Varnir differs. Varnir supports exactly six networks, all testnets — Ethereum Sepolia, Tron Nile, BNB Smart Chain testnet, Base Sepolia, Arbitrum Sepolia and Polygon Amoy (the network). Where the models genuinely differ is the shape of the key split: Varnir's advanced method is two-party threshold ECDSA where each party's share is then Shamir-split across a four-node quorum again, with no break-glass path and no operator override. Varnir's illustrative settlement model (see Pricing) would meter on the value received by a business, where Circle's published wallet pricing meters on wallet-months regardless of value moved — different billing axes, if Varnir's model is ever built and charged.
Where Circle is ahead. Everything operational: mainnet, ten-plus chains, being the issuer of the asset itself, and — most relevant to this page — actually publishing a fee schedule you can plan against. No fee runs on Varnir's ledger at all today, and the rates Pricing publishes are worked examples, not commercial rates.
BVNK
What it is. Stablecoin payment infrastructure for businesses. Its own site lists Send (global payouts), Receive (accept stablecoin payments), Store (unified fiat and stablecoin accounts), Spend (virtual cards), Earn (rewards on idle balances) and Deploy (self-managed payment infrastructure), described as "all major chains and tokens through a single API platform" — without naming the chains.
Pricing: not publicly disclosed. bvnk.com publishes no rate card and routes to "speak to an expert" throughout. What it does publish is an eligibility bar, quoted from its own home page: BVNK works with "businesses and financial institutions looking to process at least $500,000 in payments a month," with "a minimum of 6 months of trading/operating history." That is a meaningful, sourced fact and it is more useful for self-selection than a fee number would be.
Regulatory and operational claims, quoted from the same page: "40+ licences and registrations across the UK (for fiat), EU and US for fiat and digital asset payments," and "99.9% uptime, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II certified & independently audited." The site also states that "100% of customer e-money funds are safeguarded in line with regulations," which is the language of a regulated e-money institution holding client funds.
Where Varnir differs. There is no volume floor to use Varnir, because there is nothing to qualify for and testnet credits are free — anyone can onboard an identity and claim a wallet today. And the custody premise is the opposite: safeguarded e-money means the operator holds the funds under a regulatory obligation; Varnir's model is that no single machine stores a whole key, and production is designed so that no single operator can sign at all (on testnet, Varnir runs every node). Those are a policy answer and a structural answer to the same question, and the revenue model page argues the structural one is what has commercial value.
Where BVNK is ahead. Very substantially: 40+ licences to Varnir's zero, an audited compliance posture, a published uptime figure against Varnir's nonexistent operating history, fiat rails, cards, and a real business serving real volume. If you need to move real euros next quarter, this comparison is not close.
Fireblocks
What it is. Digital-asset custody and transaction infrastructure — broader than Varnir and not a payments rail — but included because it is the closest public analogue to Varnir's actual differentiating claim, and the fairest test of whether that claim is special.
Custody: the closest comparison on this page. Fireblocks' direct custody principles page states that "Fireblocks never has access to your full private key when generated, signing transactions, or backed up," that "Fireblocks cannot move your assets without your signature," and that "at no point does Fireblocks have enough key shares to unilaterally sign a transaction without the client's initiation and signature." The technology named is MPC-CMP, "an open-source and peer-reviewed algorithm developed by the Fireblocks cryptography team in 2020," with "MPC-CMP key shares implemented across multiple Trusted Execution Environments (Intel SGX)."
Pricing: partially published. Fireblocks' pricing page lists an Essentials plan at "$999 per month, up to 6 months," covering "$1,000,000 quarterly" outbound volume with a "0.20% per transaction" overage rate, 2 workspaces, 5 users and 5,000 dynamic embedded wallets. The Custom tier is "starting at $36,000 per year" and otherwise contact-sales.
Where Varnir differs. Both use threshold signing over hardware-isolated compute, and stating that plainly is more useful than pretending Varnir invented the category. The differences that are actually visible in Varnir's code: key generation cannot begin until a threshold of independent nodes has separately requested it; the Shamir shares are split 3-of-4 across the node quorum and, in the advanced method, the MPC shares are Shamir-split again; and Varnir bundles this with a settlement rail, invoicing and webhooks rather than being a custody platform you build a rail on top of. Varnir is also free today, against a $999/month entry point.
Where Fireblocks is ahead. This is the section where Varnir's honesty
obligation is heaviest.
Distribution and jurisdiction
states that Varnir's four nodes currently share one machine, one operator and
one jurisdiction; that the confidential VM runs with attestation bypassed
(MOCKCVM); and that the single-dev deployment's own README says keys on it
should be treated as already compromised. Fireblocks runs real SGX enclaves in
production, has a peer-reviewed published protocol, and has been audited.
Varnir's cryptography is real and executing; its distribution is not. Until
that changes, this comparison favours Fireblocks on the exact axis Varnir claims
as its differentiator, and anyone evaluating Varnir should discount accordingly.
Request Finance
What it is. The closest comparison on the invoicing axis, and the only company here with a complete public rate card. Its site describes a business account to "hold, receive and send 25+ currencies and stablecoins from one account," with virtual IBANs, SWIFT access, batch payments, invoicing, approval workflows and AP/AR, across a stated 190+ countries.
Pricing: fully published, from requestfinance.com/pricing, billed annually:
| Plan | Price | Included | Off-ramp fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $42/mo | 1 member, 1 entity, 5 outgoing bank transfers/mo | 1.5% (minimum fee applies) |
| Growth | $250/mo | Up to 5 members, unlimited outgoing | 0.5% flat |
| Pro | $500/mo | Up to 20 members, up to 3 entities | 0.5% flat |
| Scale | $1,040/mo | Unlimited members, up to 10 entities | 0.5% flat |
Also stated on that page: stablecoin payouts are "free unlimited volume"; banking rails cost $10 for ACH/Wire and $30 for SWIFT; and one-time funding fees are free for USDC, 0.30% for USDT, 0.30% for USD bank top-ups and 0.60% for EUR/BRL/MXN/GBP top-ups. A 30-day free trial is offered.
Custody: not publicly disclosed in the material reviewed. Neither the home page nor the top of the developer documentation states a custodial or non-custodial position, and this page will not infer one. The docs do state that "the Request Network is a decentralized protocol built on Ethereum and maintained by the Request Foundation." Stated compliance claims include SOC 2 Type 1 certification and KYB verification of counterparties.
Where Varnir differs. Varnir's invoicing is an API primitive rather than a finance-team product — named, referenced, multi-wallet invoices with automatic payment detection and HMAC-signed webhooks — and it is free, with no seat count and no subscription. The interesting contrast is the pricing shape: Request charges seats plus an off-ramp percentage and makes stablecoin payouts free, while Varnir charges nothing for seats and meters the settlement itself. If your volume is stablecoin-to-stablecoin and your team is large, those two shapes produce very different bills.
Where Request Finance is ahead. It is a working product with a free trial you can sign up for today, real fiat rails including IBANs and SWIFT, an approvals and accounting workflow Varnir has nothing resembling, and — not a small thing on a comparison page — the transparency to publish every number above without a sales call.
Side by side
Apples-to-oranges warning first: these companies meter on different axes. Circle bills wallet-months, Fireblocks bills a subscription plus volume overage, Request bills seats plus off-ramp, Varnir's contracts meter value received (and Varnir's published subscription plans would bill a monthly plan plus credits for L1 withdrawals). A single column of percentages would be misleading, so the table gives the basis rather than a league position.
| Varnir | Bridge | Circle | BVNK | Fireblocks | Request Finance | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stage | Testnet only | Production | Production | Production | Production | Production |
| Pricing published | Yes — in credits; charged on the testnet ledger for plans, withdrawals and wallets | No | Yes | No | Entry tier only | Yes, in full |
| Headline basis | Credits per action; plans bought monthly with credits (Lite 500, Hobbyist 2,900, Trader 19,900 credits a month). On testnet, charged on the ledger for plan fees, withdrawals and added wallets | Not publicly disclosed | $0.020–$0.050 per monthly active wallet; CCTP fast transfer 0–13 bps | Not publicly disclosed | $999/mo entry, 0.20% overage | $42–$1,040/mo plus 0.5–1.5% off-ramp |
| Free tier | Free plan: no fee, 1 free on-chain payout/mo on any network, a free standard wallet on each network | Not publicly disclosed | First 1,000 wallets/mo; CCTP standard transfers | None; $500k/mo minimum | None | 30-day trial |
| Custody model | No single machine stores a whole key (Shamir-split, reassembled in a confidential VM to sign; MPC option never assembles it); Varnir runs every testnet node, production designed for independent operators | Not stated; regulated MTL/EEA entities | User-controlled or developer-controlled, MPC | Safeguarded e-money, operator-held | MPC-CMP in Intel SGX; provider cannot sign alone | Not publicly disclosed |
| Chains | 2, both testnets | Not stated on site | 10+ mainnets, plus any EVM via Signing API | "All major chains", unnamed | Broad | Not stated on site |
| Licences | None | US NMLS 2450917, EEA S.A. | Extensive | 40+ stated | Extensive | Not enumerated on site |
| Invoicing | Yes, API-native | Not a listed product | Not a listed product | Not a listed product | No | Yes, full AP/AR |
| Support | None | Enterprise | Enterprise | Enterprise, 99.9% uptime stated | 8x5 basic to 24/7 platinum | Included per plan |
The one axis where Varnir isn't behind
Everything above says Varnir is behind. Here's the one place it isn't, stated precisely, alongside what would have to be true for that to matter.
Every company on this page holds a private key on your behalf, or is silent about whether it does. Fireblocks comes closest to Varnir's position and gets there through the same family of cryptography. What Varnir does differently is bind threshold key splitting to a settlement rail with invoicing and webhooks in one system, and refuse to build a break-glass path — there is no master key and no operator override. On testnet, Varnir runs every node while the network is built; production is designed to be run by separate, independent operators, so that no single party, Varnir included, can produce a signature alone.
That only counts for something if the distribution is real, and today it is not: one machine, one operator, one jurisdiction, attestation bypassed. The dependency chain puts real distribution, real confidential compute and mainnet ahead of every commercial question, in that order, for exactly this reason. A buyer comparing Varnir against any company on this page today is comparing a shipped product against an architecture. Buy on the architecture only if you are buying a direction rather than a service.
What was looked at and left out
Two further candidates were researched on 2 September 2026 and excluded, so that the omission is a stated decision rather than an oversight:
- Triple-A. Its own site states "30+ local currencies across 70+ countries," licensing including a Singapore MPI licence, an EU payment institution licence via ACPR and a French AMF CASP registration, FinCEN MSB registration and FINTRAC registration. It was excluded because its model is the inverse of Varnir's on the axis that matters: the merchant "never holds digital currency on your balance sheet" and Triple-A "settles in local currency." There is no developer custody layer to compare, so the comparison would be shaped rather than fair. Its fee — reported in its support knowledge base as a flat 1% on payments and payouts, reducible by volume — could not be confirmed by fetching the page directly (it redirect-looped), so it is not quoted above as a verified figure.
- Conduit. Now at conduitpay.com, stating USD accounts and wallets across 100+ countries, USDC/USDT/USDH, FinCEN and FINTRAC MSB registrations, and rails including Fedwire, FedNow, RTP, SWIFT, PIX, SPEI and SEPA Instant. Excluded on focus rather than quality: it is a cross-border corridor and local-rail payout business, weighted toward emerging markets, where Varnir's near-term target is Eurozone B2B USDT settlement. No pricing is published on its site, and every fee figure found for it came from third-party aggregator articles, which this page does not treat as sourcing.
Also deliberately absent: any market-size figure, funding number, customer count or transaction-volume claim, for Varnir or for anyone else. Those numbers are easy to find and hard to verify, and none of them are load-bearing for the comparison.
Sources and dates
All URLs below were read on 2 September 2026. Where a company's own page did not state something, this page says "not publicly disclosed" and does not substitute a third-party figure.
| Claim | Source |
|---|---|
| Bridge products, entities, no published pricing | bridge.xyz |
| Bridge developer fees are yours, not Bridge's | apidocs.bridge.xyz — developer fees, transaction minimums |
| Stripe completed the Bridge acquisition | stripe.com newsroom |
| No Stripe stablecoin fee published | stripe.com stablecoins, stripe.com/pricing, docs.stripe.com/crypto |
| Circle wallet pricing, custody models, chains | circle.com/wallets |
| Circle CCTP fees and "do not hardcode fee values" | developers.circle.com — CCTP fees |
| BVNK products, licences, uptime, $500k minimum | bvnk.com, bvnk.com/index.html |
| Fireblocks custody claims and MPC-CMP in SGX | fireblocks.com/principles |
| Fireblocks published plans and overage | fireblocks.com/pricing |
| Request Finance plans, off-ramp and funding fees | requestfinance.com/pricing |
| Request Finance product scope and compliance claims | requestfinance.com |
| Triple-A model and licences | triple-a.io |
| Conduit coverage, rails and registrations | conduitpay.com |
| Varnir's illustrative fee model (no fee runs on-ledger) | Pricing |
| Varnir's deployment gap | Distribution and jurisdiction |
If you find something on this page that no longer matches a company's own published material, it is stale rather than disputed — the correct move is to trust their page over this one.
Next
- Pricing — what the settlement contracts actually charge today (nothing) and the illustrative model explored for later.
- How the network makes money — why settlement basis points compress, and which layers are defensible.
- How keys are held — how Varnir's keys are held, which the Fireblocks section above compares against.