Buy a key with crypto

If you would rather not create an OpenRouter account of your own, you can buy a key straight from your Salts wallet and pay for it with crypto. The key comes loaded with the credit you paid for, and it appears in your wallet as soon as your payment is confirmed.

This guide will help you buy your first key. It takes a few minutes, and you will need a crypto wallet, such as MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet or Phantom, holding USDC or ETH on one of the networks Salts accepts.

1Open the checkout

Open your OpenRouter wallet from the top right corner of the home page. Under Get new key, click Pay with crypto. The list under it shows which coins and networks you can pay with.

2Choose how much credit you want

Under Credit, type an amount in US dollars or click one of the suggested amounts. We recommend starting with $10, since you can always buy another key later once you have a feel for how much your agent uses.

Below the amount you can see the credit that will be added to your key, the service fee, and the total under You pay. The service fee covers network and routing costs and the cost of processing crypto payments.

3Connect your crypto wallet

Under Connect your crypto wallet, click Connect wallet and choose your wallet from the list. Once it is connected, choose the network you want to pay on and the coin, USDC or ETH. Salts shows your balance so you can check you have enough before paying.

4Pay

Click the Pay button, which shows the total and the coin, such as Pay $10.50 in USDC, then approve the payment in your crypto wallet. The button changes to Waiting for the network… while the payment settles, which usually takes less than a minute.

We recommend paying within 30 minutes of starting the checkout. The price is held for that long, and a payment that arrives later does not count.

You are done

When you see Payment received. Your key is in your wallet., the new key is ready. Go back to your wallet to see it, then pick it by its nickname when you create your agent or from your agent's Settings.

If you closed the page or lost your connection before the key arrived, your payment is not lost. See Recover a lost payment.

Footnotes

• Salts creates a bought key for you and never shows you the key itself, so it can only be used from your Salts wallet.
• A bought key cannot be topped up. When its credit runs out, buy a new key and switch your agent to it.
• Credit on a bought key cannot be refunded or moved to another key.