Featured listings
Featuring is a fixed-price visibility boost for a published startup: 20 USDC for 7 days. Buying again while your feature is active extends the current window, so you never lose remaining time.
The only payment on Orbital
Featuring is currently the only payment in the product. Listing a startup is free, browsing the marketplace is free, and contacting founders is free.
What featuring buys
| Benefit | Where it shows |
|---|---|
| Top placement | Featured startups sort first in the marketplace, ahead of every filter and search result |
| Gold marker | Your startup's marker on The Orbital, the 3D globe, turns gold |
| Featured badge | Your listing carries a featured badge while the window is active |
Placement applies across the whole marketplace — see Discover for how sorting and filters work.
How the payment works
The purchase is a plain USDC transfer on Solana, signed with your own wallet. There is no card checkout and no intermediary holding your funds.
- Embedded wallets sign silently — a single click completes the purchase, with no popup to approve.
- External wallets show a normal approval prompt in your wallet app before the transfer goes out.
Before activating the feature, Orbital verifies the payment on-chain. The amount and the payer are checked against the actual transaction on Solana, and a transaction can never be counted twice. Once verification passes, your featured window starts immediately.
No USDC yet?
You can fund your wallet without leaving Orbital. The built-in onramp accepts card payments and exchange transfers, and it is available in two places:
- directly inside the purchase flow, when your balance is short
- from the wallet panel on your dashboard profile, any time
If you signed in with email or Google, an embedded Solana wallet was already created for you on first login — see Getting started if you have not set one up yet.
Duration and renewals
One purchase buys 7 days. There is no subscription and no auto-renewal: when the window ends, your listing simply returns to normal sorting. Buy again at any point — before or after expiry — to feature it again.
Today vs. roadmap
Gas-sponsored (feeless) transactions for embedded wallets are built and awaiting activation — status: in progress. Broader marketplace transactions such as escrow and settlements are vision territory, not something Orbital does today. See the Roadmap for where payments are headed.