Accepting crypto payments is now a straightforward product decision. Securing the system behind it is not.
At BlockSec, we spend our days auditing the contracts, screening the transactions, and helping teams respond when something goes wrong. The pattern is consistent: serious incidents rarely come from exotic attacks. They come from a few controls that were missing, misconfigured, or never tested.
That's why we worked with NOWPayments to build the Crypto Payment Security & Compliance Checklist — the controls every payment operator should confirm before going live, and keep confirming after.
Download the Full NOWPayments × BlockSec Crypto Payment Security & Compliance Checklist
Where Payment Systems Actually Break
The checklist covers nine areas. These are the ones teams most often get caught out on:
- Wallet security: If one key or one person can move production funds alone, you have a target, not a security model.
- Transaction signing: Material transactions need human-readable, independently verified, multi-person approval — not a single click.
- Account protection: SMS and app-code MFA is what phishing is built to beat. Sensitive accounts need phishing-resistant factors (FIDO2 / WebAuthn).
- On-chain monitoring: Spotting an anomalous transfer in the daily reconciliation isn't detection — it's a post-mortem. Real-time alerting buys response time.
- AML/CFT screening: Verifying who a customer is says nothing about where their funds have been. Identity checks need to be paired with on-chain screening (KYA + KYT).
- Stablecoin freeze risk: When an address is frozen, the teams that lose most are the ones improvising. A documented escalation path turns an emergency into a procedure.
That's six of the nine. The full checklist also covers smart-contract security, DNS and domain hardening, and continuous improvement — training, drills, and learning from industry incidents — with two or three concrete, technology-neutral principles under each area.
Get the Checklist
Most of the incidents we respond to trace back to a control the team already knew about but had never verified end to end. A checklist won't make a system secure on its own — what it does is make the gaps impossible to ignore.
Whether you're launching your first crypto payment flow or hardening one in production, it's a fast way to pressure-test what you have against what actually goes wrong — and to align your security, compliance, operations, and product teams before launch.
Download the Full NOWPayments × BlockSec Crypto Payment Security & Compliance Checklist
