hacking.community × crypt.pe
hacking.community is a proving ground for ethical hackers — hands-on labs, live CTF competitions, cloud attack boxes and real bug bounty programs — built by HACKASTRA INFOSEC L.L.C-FZ, the same founder as crypt.pe. As with the hackastra case study, that connection is disclosed up front: this is the founder running crypt.pe's gateway API in production on his own platform.
hacking.community's paying users are the opposite of a single-market audience: students in Southeast Asia, bounty hunters in Eastern Europe, red-teamers in the Gulf, hobbyists everywhere. Selling them a $12/mo Pro plan or a $4.99 attack-box hour pack ran into the same wall from three directions:
- →Cross-border card payments fail disproportionately often for exactly this audience — cards that decline internationally, banks that flag anything security-related, and plenty of skilled users with no international card at all.
- →Card processors treat "hacking" businesses as a high-risk category, even when the product is legal, educational and defensive — a category label that means extra friction, extra review and the standing risk of an account freeze.
- →On a $4.99 hour pack, a percentage fee plus a fixed per-transaction fee eats a painful slice of the smallest — and most popular — purchase on the pricing page.
And the audience itself is privacy-conscious by profession. Many of the platform's best users simply prefer not to put a card on file — but most of them already hold crypto.
hacking.community kept its card checkout and added crypt.pe as the crypto rail beside it — the pricing page now reads card via stripe · crypto accepted — btc, usdt, eth, sol + 20 more · 0% fees. Under the hood it's the standard crypt.pe gateway API:
- →The site creates an order server-side (POST /v1/payments) and redirects the user to a hosted checkout — no wallet addresses or QR plumbing to build or maintain.
- →A signed webhook (payment.confirmed) flips Pro access or credits the hour pack automatically the moment the payment confirms on-chain — no human in the loop.
- →Everything was built against sandbox test keys first: test orders, simulated payments, real signed webhooks — then switched to live keys.
- →Support edge cases are covered too: if a user pays but the order looks expired, the tx-hash can be re-verified — by the payer on the checkout page or by the team from the merchant dashboard and API.
no market left out
A skilled user with no international card — or no card at all — can pay in whichever of 24+ coins they already hold. The checkout works the same from every country.
0% on micro-purchases
Hour packs from $4.99 settle with no percentage skimmed and no fixed per-transaction fee — the economics of small prepaid packs finally work.
webhook-driven access
payment.confirmed flips Pro and credits packs automatically. On-chain settlement lands straight in the company wallet — nothing sits with a processor that classifies the business as high-risk.
members accept crypto too
hacking.community promotes crypt.pe to its own users: bounty hunters and freelancers showcase their crypt.pe payment link on their public hacker profile — and get paid the same way the platform does.
A pricing page that used to depend entirely on cards clearing across borders now has a second rail that can't be geo-blocked, can't freeze the account for being a "hacking" business, and takes 0% of every hour pack. The card checkout stayed; crypto simply covers everyone it couldn't.
"Hackers are the most global, most privacy-minded audience you can sell to — and half the payment stack treats them as a risk category. Crypto checkout via my own gateway was the obvious answer: same API I ship to every crypt.pe merchant, running my own platform's revenue."
Selling to a global audience? The same gateway API takes an afternoon to integrate.
read the api docs →