Helius case study: Building a billing experience with Loop Crypto and Stripe
Tl;dr: As Helius experienced rapid growth, they needed deeper data insights and an in-app billing solution that could scale with their business. Their existing provider only supported one-time crypto payments and lacked an integration with their billing system, making it difficult to track key metrics and manage operations efficiently. To solve this, Helius turned to Loop Crypto, which provided a seamless, integrated solution that enhanced the customer experience and financial visibility.
In November 2024, Helius went live with Loop Crypto to facilitate crypto subscription payments for its customers on Solana. Already, the team has seen crypto payment volume grow 25% month-over-month. As one of the leading infrastructure companies offering RPC and staking services on Solana, Helius serves developers around the globe who are building the leading on-chain applications across financial services, gaming, NFTs, identity management, and much more. When it comes to building on the Solana blockchain, Helius is at the core of the developer ecosystem offering a range of solutions and resources to both individual developers and large enterprise teams engaging with the chain.
Helius’s crypto billing system was stalling its rapid growth. They realized they needed to rebuild their recurring crypto payments operations for scale, so the team turned to Loop Crypto. Helius focused on finding a crypto payment solution that could do the following:
Integrate with their existing billing management system, which is Stripe
Offer one unified view of core business metrics, such as total sales, which products customers were purchasing, and churn rates, regardless of the payment method - fiat or crypto
Provide a flexible API that would allow them to design a fully white-labeled in-app billing experience for their end customers
As we will explore in this case study, Loop’s Stripe integration and APIs gave Helius the solution it needed to prepare itself for the newest wave of developer activity on Solana.
What is a subscription management platform?
When we talk about Helius’s “billing system,” what we’re really referring to is a “subscription management platform.” Almost all businesses with a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model use some type of subscription management platform. Some of the more popular solutions include Stripe, OpenPay, and Chargebee. These platforms handle all the logic and complexity of managing recurring payments for flat-rate subscriptions, usage-based models, or pricing plans with a combination of both. For example, if your customer upgrades and needs to pay for the upgrade immediately, the billing system will calculate the pro-rated amount and generate the due invoice for the rest of the billing period.
The subscription management platform is about creating the invoice. Subscription management platforms sit on top of payment processors, like Loop Crypto, Stripe, and WorldPay, which then execute the invoice for payment. These processor systems are about moving money from the customer to the merchant.
When SaaS businesses add a crypto payment option, one of the core challenges is that most crypto payment solutions do not integrate with these subscription management platforms. This is where Loop excels!
From our early days, we identified this ability to plug crypto payments into these subscription management platforms as a core need in the market, especially for rapidly scaling SaaS businesses like Helius. Subscription management platforms have robust feature sets and analytics specific to companies handling recurring payments. Companies need access to these features regardless of whether a customer pays in fiat or crypto.
The Helius team found Loop stood out because it was a solution tailored specifically to recurring subscription payments and had an integration with Stripe. Coinbase Commerce, Nowpayments, and others allowed companies to accept one-off payments, but Loop Crypto was the clear leader when it came to a solution designed for the nuances of managing subscription payments, including unlocking autopay and plugging into these subscription management platforms. In addition, Loop offered a flexible suite of APIs that would allow Helius to build an in-app billing page for their end customers.
Who is Helius?
Helius is Solana’s leading RPC provider. They have raised over $34M in capital since their founding in 2022. Their customers are primarily highly technical developers who are building a broad range of applications on Solana. These customers are spread across the world. Crypto payments are an ideal globally interoperable solution to serve the payment needs of this user base.
Helius customers expect a self-serve checkout experience that is easily available within the Helius dashboard. When these developers need access to RPC nodes, they want to pay quickly and then get back to building. Like many infrastructure companies, Helius offers a pricing model that is based on usage. As their customers’ applications grow and scale, Helius’ pricing model accommodates their increased usage. This means they need a payment solution that can gracefully handle specific billing scenarios like upgrades, downgrades, and top-ups.
Scaling to unlock more growth
Over the last two years, Helius has seen growth explode, onboarding more and more developers. Their North Star has always been centered around building the best developer platform with an amazing customer experience. When they first launched their product, Helius implemented Stripe for recurring billing. Their rapid growth quickly posed challenges for their existing financial operations, especially as they started accepting crypto payments. As an infrastructure company serving developers, they realized they were serving a customer base that preferred to pay in crypto and was demanding it. Particularly for crypto-focused products, in our own work at Loop, we have seen that anywhere from 20 to 50% of all payers will opt for crypto, with 1 in 5 in the US.
Having a billing system that could support and allow them to manage crypto payments alongside fiat was a must to meet the demands of their customers. Ultimately, the Helius team determined they would need to upgrade their payment infrastructure to unlock the next phase of growth.
With this need to support both fiat and crypto payment options, one of the first challenges they faced was integrating their payment systems. For fiat payments, their billing logic and transaction history lived in Stripe. Like most traditional Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) businesses, they configured recurring subscription products in Stripe and then embedded payment links on their website. Users with credit cards could set up fiat autopay to pay for their Helius subscription on an ongoing basis. Helius then enabled a separate crypto payment system, but it did not natively integrate with Stripe. Customers had to pay in crypto by purchasing top-up credits, but the users, product details, and transaction history of those paying in crypto were siloed from customers paying in fiat. The two systems did not compose with each other.
This solution did not scale as Helius onboarded more customers. Because of the two systems and the limitations of their initial provider, Helius was unable to get a complete view of their revenues, product sales, and churn. When it came to understanding crypto payments, they were tracking transactions directly on-chain and lacked visibility around what each payment was for (e.g. subscription plan, payment frequency, upgrades/downgrades, etc.). They were missing a truly integrated billing system that would allow them to handle all of the intricacies of managing subscriptions while providing transparent reporting.
Finally, reliability and fast support were key considerations as they evaluated crypto payment providers for their next evolution of growth. Especially during a bull market, Helius could see massive spikes in sign-up volumes. They needed a solution and team that would collaborate with them closely to address this increased demand and ensure they did not miss out on revenue opportunities.
How Helius implemented Loop Crypto
At Loop, we collaborated closely with the Helius team on implementation. Given Helius’s size and importance to the Solana ecosystem, we offered white-glove onboarding experience bringing in our CTO and a dedicated engineer to oversee the process. Since our founding, Loop had focused on Ethereum and the ecosystem of EVM chains, so moving to Solana was a new endeavor for the team, but Helius was the perfect anchor customer to collaborate with. The engineering team worked relentlessly to deploy on Solana and ensure we adapted our architecture to support the technical differences between the two chains.
As noted earlier, Helius was keen to have a crypto payment system that integrated seamlessly with their existing fiat system. In addition, Loop’s unique ability to offer crypto autopay would bring automation to the process of managing subscription payments. There were three phases to the implementation work:
1. Create an Embedded Payment Flow
First, Helius focused on setting up Loop to process net new subscriptions. They worked on launching a sign-up flow embedded in their website that would allow new Helius users to sign up, pay in crypto, and enable automated recurring payments. To go to production as quickly as possible, Helius decided to start by using Loop’s frontends, embedding a redirect link to a Loop checkout page within their sign-up flow. This removed the need to redesign their entire sign-up flow and gave users an experience similar to what they were accustomed to when paying with fiat.
2. Migrate Existing Crypto Customers to Loop
With their old provider, Helius had a number of customers who had prepaid for credits with one-off crypto payments. They needed to easily transition these users to the recurring payment model enabled by Loop.
The Helius and Loop teams closely collaborated to design a migration strategy while accounting for the nuances of Helius’s Stripe setup. With this work complete, Helius now had all of its customers tracked in one system regardless of payment method.
3. Develop a White-labeled Billing Experience
Lastly, Helius completed the rollout of a white-labeled in-app billing experience built on top of Loop’s APIs. Drawing on Loop’s comprehensive API documentation, Helius was able to fully customize its sign-up experience and launched its new checkout page in early January 2025 with crypto seamlessly embedded as a payment option. As you can see in the video below, paying in crypto is one quick toggle and then signing a confirmation message to authorize payment.
[embed video of user checking out on Helius]
What has been the impact of using Loop?
Loop allows Helius to have one integrated billing system. This enables them to better understand their customers, reliably collect on all of their payments, and save time and money from reduced manual payment operations. With the new white-labeled solution using Loop’s APIs, Helius has been able to further customize its billing system making it easier to manage all the permutations of their pricing plan.
In addition to Loop’s flexibility, Helius has derived value from the increased visibility it now has into its payments and revenue operations. All transactions and customer data are automatically synced into Stripe providing them with one source of truth that they can reliably build reporting off of. There is no more reconciling between systems.
Additionally, Loop has drastically reduced the manual work required to manage crypto payments through its automations. Rather than chasing customers to purchase one-off top-up payments, crypto autopay enables customers to authorize recurring payments just as one would with a credit card or bank account. All receipts, reminders, and late payment notifications are also automated via Loop eliminating the need to spend time chasing customers month after month.
Conclusion
As we continue to see broader acceptance of crypto and more building on chain, we are excited about the growth that is ahead for Helius. Already, the team is growing crypto payment volume by 25% month-over-month. With their new billing experience built on top of Loop’s APIs, we expect this growth to only accelerate as friction is completely removed from the experience of paying in crypto.
If you’re serving developers and looking to accept crypto to grow your revenue or a payment management system yourself and want to unlock crypto payments for your merchants, get in touch. Loop makes it simple to implement crypto payments and unlock new customers around the globe.
