How an on-chain transaction works, explained for your accountant

Your company received its first stablecoin payment and the client's email says: "all paid, here's the hash." Finance opens the message and finds a long string of letters and numbers, with none of the fields they normally look for: no account number, no sending bank, no value date. The question that lands on the accountant's desk is a close question: what do I file, which invoice do I match it to, and what do I show a reviewer.

At Soulbit Academy we explain the mechanism rather than the technology. Soulbit is a stablecoin payments and treasury rail for companies. This article translates the six moving parts of an on-chain transfer into concepts finance already uses, and ends where it should: what belongs in the file for every payment.

What an address is, and why it is not an IBAN

An address is where funds land: a string of characters identifying an account in a network's ledger. That is where the resemblance to an IBAN stops.

What changes is the information attached. An IBAN encodes country and institution, and when you order a wire the bank checks the beneficiary name against the account number. An address carries no country, no institution and no account holder, and there is no central directory saying who owns it. The only way to know an address belongs to your supplier is that they provided it and you verified it through an independent channel.

That produces one concrete control: payee addresses live in a validated master file, with additions and changes subject to second-channel confirmation.

The transaction hash, the receipt nobody can edit

Every executed transaction gets a unique identifier, the transaction hash. It is the payment reference number, with one difference: no bank issues it, the operation itself produces it, and it cannot be altered afterwards. With that hash, anyone can look up in a block explorer the sending address, the receiving address, the exact amount, the block timestamp, the status and the fee paid.

Does the hash hold up in a review?

It holds up as evidence of the funds movement, which is exactly what proof of payment does: it shows an amount left one address for another on a verifiable date. What it does not show is the reason for the payment, who controls the receiving address, or which invoice it settles.

So the hash does not replace documentation, it completes it: the file still needs the invoice, the contract and evidence of address ownership. Its advantage over a bank statement is that a third party can verify it independently, at any time.

On-chain concept	What finance already recognises	The difference that matters
Address	Beneficiary account number or IBAN	No holder, institution or country attached, and no name check
Transaction hash	Payment reference number	Unique, public and verifiable without asking a bank
Network or blockchain	Payment system or clearing house	Each network is a separate ledger; balances do not cross on their own
Confirmation	Payment status at the bank (in process, credited)	Measured in blocks and seconds, not business days
Network fee	Wire fee and intermediary charges	Charged by the network, and independent of the amount sent
Finality	Value date and definitive settlement	Once reached there is no recall or bank reversal

What a network is, and why the same stablecoin lives on several

A network, or blockchain, is the shared ledger where transactions are recorded. The useful analogy is not "the internet": it is a payment system with its own general ledger, its own always-open schedule and its own fee unit.

Several of those ledgers exist at once, and the same digital dollar lives on more than one. Circle, the issuer of USDC, reports native support on 35 networks as of June 2026. These are not 35 different currencies: it is the same unit, redeemable at par, deployed on different ledgers. Tether follows similar logic with USDT.

The operating rule has no exceptions: payer and payee must use the same network. If you send on a network your counterparty does not support, the funds are recorded on a ledger where they may not control that address. That is why supplier onboarding asks for address and network, not just address. For the underlying vocabulary, see the difference between a stablecoin and a cryptocurrency and what USDC is.

Confirmations and finality: when the payment stops being in transit

This is the concept that fixes the moment of recognition. A sent transaction is first included in a block; the network then stacks blocks on top, and each one is a confirmation. The more confirmations, the less likely the network reorganises the record and voids the payment. Past a certain number it is treated as definitive: that is the point of finality. For the BIS payments committee and IOSCO, final settlement is the irrevocable and unconditional transfer of an asset, and Principle 8 of the Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures requires rules to define clearly when that point is reached.

Timings differ by network. According to Circle's documentation on confirmations and finality, consulted in August 2026, a fast-finality network reaches the definitive state in roughly 5 seconds with a single block, others in about 8 seconds, and Ethereum mainnet requires around 65 blocks, some 15 to 19 minutes.

The contrast with the banking rail is "in transit": the payment sits in neither account and nobody can see where it is. The G20 target is that by end-2027, 75% of cross-border payments reach the recipient within one hour, per the targets published by the FSB. That is a target, not today's reality: the October 2025 progress report acknowledges that improvements are not yet reaching end users. The two rails are compared in SWIFT vs stablecoin.

What happens if you get the address or the network wrong?

Generally, nothing you can fix on your own. Finality cuts both ways: a confirmed receipt cannot be reversed, and neither can a confirmed mistake. If the address belongs to a third party, a return depends on their goodwill; if the network is wrong, funds may be unreachable.

So diligence moves upstream of the payment: whitelisted payees, dual approval for additions and changes, and a small test transfer the first time you pay a new address.

Payment stage	Traditional international wire	On-chain stablecoin transfer
Initiation	Instruction to the bank within cut-off	Signed at any hour, any day
Intermediate state	Days in the correspondent chain, no visibility	Confirmations visible from the first block
Definitive settlement	Value date set by the institutions	When the network's required confirmations are reached
Reversibility	Recall or inter-bank mediation possible	None; only the recipient can send funds back
Evidence for a review	Bank statement and internal bank messaging	Immutable public record plus the internal file

The network fee: what gas is and who pays it

Every transaction pays a fee to the network that processes it. It is called gas, and it does not behave like a bank charge: it measures the computational effort the operation requires. The official Ethereum documentation on gas sets out the formula, gas units consumed times the price per unit, which combines a protocol base fee and a priority tip. A simple transfer consumes 21,000 units.

Three accounting consequences follow. The fee does not depend on the amount: moving 500 dollars or 500,000 on the same network costs practically the same, which inverts the economics of large payments. The sender who signs pays it, in the network's native currency, and it is charged even if the transaction fails. And the exact figure sits inside the transaction record.

The level varies by network and with congestion: as observed in August 2026, some high-throughput networks charge fractions of a cent while Ethereum mainnet can run from cents to several dollars under heavy demand. Take the number from each payment's record, not from a general table. On the banking rail, by contrast, cost is spread across layers deducted in transit: the World Bank's Remittance Prices Worldwide monitor measured a 6.36% global average cost to send 200 dollars in the third quarter of 2025, and 14.99% through the banking channel.

From hash to working papers: the file for every payment

All of the above exists to close the month with sufficient evidence. The file for a stablecoin payment has seven pieces: the invoice creating the obligation; the contract or purchase order; the hash; the network used; the sending and receiving addresses, with evidence the recipient is the registered supplier; the block timestamp and confirmations when the payment was treated as final; and the network fee plus the rate applied if there was a conversion.

How do you match a hash to an invoice at month-end?

With a reference field in the subledger, exactly as you match a bank reference. Record the hash in the entry itself, so the line item and the public record are joined by a unique identifier. Once the hash sits in the entry, reconciliation stops being a search and becomes a one-to-one comparison. The full procedure is in how to reconcile stablecoin payments in accounting.

One question the hash does not answer is how the balance is classified in the financial statements. The IFRS Interpretations Committee agenda decision of June 2019 concluded that cryptocurrency holdings are neither cash nor a financial asset: they are inventory when held for sale in the ordinary course of business, and an intangible asset otherwise. A fiat-backed stablecoin raises its own questions, and tax treatment is set jurisdiction by jurisdiction: the country-level picture is in the crypto payments guides.

What Soulbit V1 delivers and what it does not

Soulbit V1 records every transaction with on-chain traceability: each movement in the business account is tied to its unique identifier and to the network it travelled on. On that base it offers reconciliation, KYB, AML/KYT monitoring of funds, payment links and QR codes you can attach to an invoice, and conversion to fiat in USD, EUR and GBP by quote on request, with the price visible before you confirm.

What it does not do deserves the same clarity. The only local banking rail is Colombia: elsewhere, moving to national currency is handled by the company with its bank. There are no cards, no yield on balances, no proprietary token and no native mobile app. And it issues neither tax documents nor journal entries: the on-chain record is evidence of the movement; the entry is made by your accounting system.

The balance for an accountant is sober: the on-chain rail gives a better receipt than the banking rail, unique and verifiable without asking permission, but it removes the safety net of a reversible mistake.