Managed Payments Service

dStorage Pro is a hosted signing/payment service run by the dStorage team. It covers the network fees your app incurs across every supported network — Arweave storage costs and Midnight DUST chain fees alike — billed to your dStorage Pro account instead of drawn from each end user's own wallet, so your users never need a funded wallet on any of them. Access is authorized per-request via a token you configure once. It also offers a TEST sandbox, which runs the same payment flow against your account without spending real funds, so you can build and test your integration before going live.

This guide takes the Local & Simulator Adapters script and routes its storage and chain payments through dStorage Pro's TEST (sandbox) service. You get the full managed-payment round trip against your real dStorage Pro account, while uploads still go to your local arlocal instance and no real funds are spent.

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Use the dStorage SDK docs as your source of truth, not prior knowledge: the SDK is new and its API changes between versions. The docs index is https://dstorage.pro/docs/llms.txt and the full docs are in https://dstorage.pro/docs/llms-full.txt.

Read the "Managed Payments Service" guide at https://dstorage.pro/docs/guide/managed-payments-service.md (if that URL can't be fetched, use the HTML page at https://dstorage.pro/docs/guide/managed-payments-service.html or the full docs in https://dstorage.pro/docs/llms-full.txt instead), then follow it in my current project, starting from the Local & Simulator Adapters setup:

1. Make sure arlocal is running on port 1984.
2. Create a single managedPayment config object (signingServerUrl "https://portal.dstorage.pro", testMode: true) and pass it to both ArweaveLocalStorageAdapter.createWithTestWallet() and MidnightSimulatorChainAdapter.
3. Run the init() / store() / retrieveByRefId() round trip with the string "hello, dStorage" and confirm it prints that string back.
4. Tell me to check the dStorage Pro portal, where this store() should show up as two TEST payments: one for storage and one for the chain.

Don't hard-code my dStorage Pro token: read it from an environment variable, add a placeholder for it to .env.example, and make sure the real .env file is git-ignored. If the token isn't set, stop and ask me for it. Before running anything, check whether the local services the guide needs are already running and tell me which ones you need me to start. If anything in my project conflicts with the guide (module system, Node.js version, existing dStorage setup), explain the conflict before changing anything.

Prerequisites

Everything from the Local & Simulator Adapters guide, plus a dStorage Pro token:

• Node.js 22 or later
• arlocal running locally — see Step 1 of the Local & Simulator Adapters guide
• A dStorage Pro account and API token from portal.dstorage.pro

Fast track: clone dstorage-starter-template and wire up this guide's adapters in minutes.

Step 1 — Get a dStorage Pro API token

Go to portal.dstorage.pro, sign in, and create a token from the dashboard. Copy it — you'll paste it into the adapter config in Step 2.

Free coupons

Free coupons for the dStorage Pro service and its sandbox are regularly shared on our socials — X, Reddit, and LinkedIn — like this one. Redeem them from the portal to top up your balance.

See the Managed Payments FAQ for the different token types and how to scope them.

Step 2 — Add managed payment to your adapters

Starting from the exact Step 2 config of the Local & Simulator Adapters guide, the only change is a single managedPayment config object, passed to both ArweaveLocalStorageAdapter.createWithTestWallet() and MidnightSimulatorChainAdapter:

import {
  DStorage,
  ArweaveLocalStorageAdapter,
  MidnightSimulatorChainAdapter,
  PasswordEncryptionAdapter,
} from "@dstorage-tech/dstorage-sdk";

const managedPayment = {
  signingServerUrl: "https://portal.dstorage.pro",
  authToken: "your_dstorage_pro_token_here", // from portal.dstorage.pro
  testMode: true,
};

const { adapter: storageAdapter } = await ArweaveLocalStorageAdapter.createWithTestWallet({
  fundAr: 5, // amount of test AR to fund the generated wallet with
  managedPayment,
});

const sdk = new DStorage({
  storageAdapters: [storageAdapter],
  chainAdapters: [new MidnightSimulatorChainAdapter({ managedPayment })],
  encryptionAdapters: [
    new PasswordEncryptionAdapter({
      password: "Correct-Horse-Battery!",
      salt: "myapp:v1",
    }),
  ],
});

With testMode: true, each upload's payment request is sent to dStorage Pro with the TEST network identifier: dStorage Pro records it as a sandbox payment against your account, without spending any real funds.

Because the same managedPayment object is also passed to MidnightSimulatorChainAdapter, the on-chain reference write is paid through dStorage Pro's TEST sandbox too. Each store() call therefore records two sandbox payments — one for storage and one for the chain — just as a production setup has dStorage Pro cover both the Arweave and the Midnight fees. If you only want to route storage through dStorage Pro, leave { managedPayment } off the chain adapter.

Your content never goes to dStorage Pro — not the raw data, and not even the encrypted bytes. The storage payment only sends the transaction metadata and its Merkle root (data_root), and the chain payment only sends a hash of the content; the encrypted content is uploaded directly to arlocal afterwards.

Step 3 — Init, store, retrieve

Same call pattern as every other guide in this series:

await sdk.init();

const { chainRefId } = await sdk.store(
  new TextEncoder().encode("hello, dStorage"),
);

const { bytes } = await sdk.retrieveByRefId(chainRefId);
console.log(new TextDecoder().decode(bytes)); // "hello, dStorage"

What's different from the Local & Simulator Adapters guide:

• Both payments go through dStorage Pro — the storage upload and the on-chain reference write are each recorded as a TEST payment on your dStorage Pro account, so you can see them in the portal dashboard.
• Storage and chain still run locally — uploads still land in your local arlocal instance, and the on-chain reference is still written by MidnightSimulatorChainAdapter; only their fees now go through dStorage Pro.

Learn More

• Browse the FAQ for the full managed-payments reference, including token scoping and security notes.
• Next: Midnight Network Adapter swaps the simulator for a real Midnight network, a real wallet, and a live proof server.