Guides

Staging and Testnets

Staging is testnet-only and enforced at startup; the supported test networks, faucets, and the mainnet-only production rule.

Last updated 2026-07-16View as Markdown

Coinbax runs two fully separated environments. Staging only ever touches test networks; production only ever touches mainnets. The separation is not a convention: it is enforced in infrastructure. A staging deployment configured with a mainnet network refuses to start, and the same guard works in reverse for production. There is no configuration mistake that sends staging traffic to real funds.

Environment Networks Payments API base
Staging Testnet only https://api-staging.coinbax.com/api/v1
Production Mainnet only https://api.coinbax.com/api/v1

Credentials are environment-specific: a staging API key is meaningless against production and vice versa.

Supported testnets (staging)

Base Sepolia is the primary staging network and the one used throughout these guides.

Network blockchainNetwork value Chain ID
Base Sepolia (primary) base-sepolia 84532
Ethereum Sepolia ethereum-sepolia 11155111
Optimism Sepolia optimism-sepolia 11155420
Arbitrum Sepolia arbitrum-sepolia 421614
Solana Devnet solana-devnet devnet

Network coercion on staging

Staging is forgiving about network names: if you send a mainnet name (for example base) to staging, it is coerced to the testnet counterpart (base-sepolia). This lets the same integration code run against both environments with only the base URL and credentials changing. Production is not forgiving in the other direction: a testnet network name sent to production is rejected with TESTNET_NOT_ALLOWED_IN_PRODUCTION.

If you omit blockchainNetwork, transactions default to the environment’s Base network: base-sepolia on staging, base on production.

Test funds

Test USDC on Base Sepolia:

0x036CbD53842c5426634e7929541eC2318f3dCF7e

Get testnet USDC from the Circle faucet; select Base Sepolia as the network. Circle’s faucet also covers the other supported testnets.

You will also need a small amount of testnet ETH (or the network’s native token) for gas when funding escrows from an external wallet. Any public Base Sepolia faucet works.

Testnet tokens have no value. Treat staging balances as disposable.

Production networks (mainnet only)

Network blockchainNetwork value Chain ID
Base base 8453
Ethereum ethereum 1
Optimism optimism 10
Arbitrum arbitrum 42161
Solana solana mainnet-beta

Production access is provisioned separately from staging; talk to the Coinbax team when you are ready to go live.

  1. Build on staging against Base Sepolia. It is the primary network, has the deepest tooling support, and the faucets are reliable.
  2. Exercise the whole lifecycle, including the endings you hope never to use: refunds, rescinds, failed compliance checks, disputes. Staging escrows are free to abandon.
  3. Point your webhook endpoint at a staging URL and verify signature handling and dedupe before production traffic depends on it.
  4. Promote by changing base URL and credentials only. If your staging integration needed any other change to work in production, that is a finding worth investigating before launch.

Next steps