For First-Timers
How to Buy USDC
You do not need to understand crypto to place an order. You need one coin, on one network, and about fifteen minutes.
Start here
If you have never bought cryptocurrency before, this is shorter than you expect. You are not investing in anything and you are not holding anything volatile — you are buying a dollar-pegged coin called USDC, sending it once, and never thinking about it again. Read the section below that matches what you already have; if you already hold a stablecoin, you can skip almost all of this.
Which applies to you?
What you should do depends on what you already hold — not on which network is cheapest. Find your row and stop there.
You hold USDC or USDT on Ethereum
Just pay. Don't move it.You already hold something we accept. Go to checkout, choose Ethereum, and send it. Do not bridge or swap to Solana to save on gas — bridging costs a fee of its own, adds steps, and every extra hop is another chance to send to the wrong place. A few dollars of gas is the cheaper mistake.
You hold USDT somewhere else
Your network is Ethereum.We accept USDT on Ethereum only — not on Solana, and not on Tron, which is where a lot of USDT lives. If your USDT is on another network, withdraw it to Ethereum, or swap it for USDC and use Solana. Do not try to send USDT on Solana: we do not accept it there, and your exchange may refuse the withdrawal outright.
You hold Nothing yet
Buy USDC, withdraw on Solana.Buy USDC — not Bitcoin, not Ethereum, not USDT. USDC is pegged to the dollar, so $180 of it is $180 and there is no rate to watch between buying and paying. Then withdraw on Solana if your exchange offers it: fees there are a fraction of a cent instead of a few dollars.
Send on the same network you selected at checkout — this is the one mistake we cannot undo.
Your exchange or wallet will ask which network to send on, and it has to match the one you picked. On Ethereum (sometimes labelled ERC-20) this matters most: Polygon, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism and BNB Chain all use an address in the same 0x… format as ours, so the withdrawal screen will happily accept our address and send your money to a chain we do not watch. On Solana, send only the coin you selected — each coin has its own address there and they are not interchangeable. Funds sent on the wrong network cannot be recovered.
Buying it, step by step
For the case where you are starting from nothing. Four steps, and only one of them really matters.
Open an account somewhere that sells USDC
Any major exchange will sell you USDC. At the time of writing, Coinbase and Kraken are the usual starting points and both let you withdraw it — we are not affiliated with either, and you are not limited to them. Expect to verify your identity with a photo ID; that is a legal requirement for the exchange, not something we ask for or ever see. Budget about fifteen minutes, most of it waiting on verification.
Buy USDC with a card or a bank transfer
Buy the amount you plan to spend, plus a little. A bank transfer is usually the cheapest way in; a debit card is faster and costs more. Buy USDC directly rather than buying Bitcoin and swapping — every conversion costs a spread, and you would only be converting back to a dollar-pegged coin anyway.
Check the network selector before you withdraw
This is the step that decides everything, and it takes five seconds. On the withdraw screen, select USDC first, then open the network dropdown. If Solana is listed, choose it — that is the cheap path. If it is not listed, choose Ethereum. We accept both, so either answer is a good outcome: there is nothing to fix and nothing to bridge.
Know which fee you pay, and in what
The network fee is paid by your wallet, separately from the amount you send us — never deduct it from that amount. Withdrawing from an exchange, the fee is usually a flat charge and you need nothing extra. From a self-custody wallet like Phantom or MetaMask you do need a little of the network's own coin: SOL on Solana, ETH on Ethereum. Buying USDC and nothing else, then wondering why a self-custody send will not go through, is the most common way this stalls.
Why Solana is the cheaper path — and when it isn’t
A Solana transfer costs a fraction of a cent, paid in SOL. An Ethereum transfer costs a few dollars in gas, paid in ETH, and rises when the network is busy. On a single order that difference is worth five seconds of checking a dropdown.
It stops being the cheaper path the moment you would have to move coins to reach it. If your money is already USDC or USDT on Ethereum, paying on Ethereum is cheaper than bridging to Solana and paying there. And on Solana we accept USDC only — USDT is not an option on that network, so a USDT holder has no cheap path to chase and should simply use Ethereum.
Would you rather not do any of this?
Then don’t. Cash App is available at checkout and is confirmed by hand, usually within a few hours, and any store credit on your account can be applied to an order. The payment options shown at checkout are always the current list — if we add a method, it appears there first.
You have USDC. What now?
Everything from here — generating your quote, sending the exact amount, and how we confirm it on-chain — is covered in the payment guide. You will be shown the exact amount and the address to send it to at checkout.