Overview

Rail is a next generation, regulated Payments infrastructure that seamlessly combines vairous assets into a single, easy to use API. With a multi-partner approach, we have simplified the complex payments ecosystems; enabling fintechs (regulated or not), neobanks (regulated or not) to launch innovative payments products within days.

We do this by providing clients a single, easy to use API to integrate with, while we take on the heavy lifting of integrating with various crypto and fiat partners, such as qualified custodians, licensed exchanges, licensed lenders, banks, and crypto networks. We stitch these various endpoints via an integrated omnibus ledger, workflow, fiat and crypto capabilities to construct easy to use, fully compliant financial products.

We even take care of the AML, Fraud and other compliance requirements, so fintechs/ neobanks don't have to be a regulated Financial Institution to offer our products.

To learn how to use our API, products to build your use cases, you need to understand the following key concepts in our platform. You can go through it one by one or skip to a specific area of interest. Once you are done with the Concepts, suggest you complete our 10 minute Build Guides.

Business Concepts

path

Clients - Organizations that are offering the Rail Crypto products to the end user/ Customer
Customers - Customers, belonging to clients are End Users of the system. Customers can be businesses, accredited investors or individuals.
Products - Products (or sometimes referred to as Financial Products) represent the various types of Accounts that customers can create.
Assets - Assets represent the various types of currencies that customers can hold in their accounts.
Applications - Applications are used to onboard Customers onto the Rail Platform and open their first Account.
Accounts - Accounts are at the heart of the Rail platform. They are the core book of record for a customers financial transactions and are backed by a complex set of double-entry ledgers.
Counterparties - Counterparties are used in deposit and withdrawal operations and represent external accounts that funds are withdrawn to or pulled from (e.g. ACH Pull)
Payors - Payors represent entities that are making payments to a Customer's Payment Account.
Deposits - Depositing receives fiat or crypto funds from external accounts into a Rail account.
Withdrawals - Withdrawing sends fiat or crypto from Rail accounts to external accounts.
Transfers - Transfer moves funds between any two accounts of the same asset type.
Exchanges - Exchange swaps crypto to fiat assets and vice versa.

Technical Concepts

Authentication - Rail leverages OAuth2 with the client credentials grant type to authenticate your API requests.
External Identifiers - We allow you to use your existing identifiers of key entities to refer to the same entities within our system, reducing your integration burden.
Request Signing - Certain endpoints require secondary validation prior to the request being accepted for processing. We use Ed25519 based signatures to validate requests
Idempotence - Certain endpoints support idempotent requests so that a given request can be safely retried without performing the same operation twice.
Callbacks (Webhooks) - Callbacks (also known as webhooks) are a means to provide asynchronous responses to you.