Beans is a non-custodial payments app that targets the general public, not just the crypto community. We offer seamless Stellar-based payments and plan to expand into user-friendly smart contract access for everyone. To achieve this goal, we are launching new products and services:

Beans check-out

We will extend our payment requests to web so that (Soroban) projects or webshops can integrate with Beans and use our cash (Moneygram) and bank on/offramps. At check-out a project or webshop generates a "Pay with Beans" QR code through our public API. They can set the amount, currency, destination address, webhook callback and optional memo. A Beans user scans the QR and pays with their preferred currency. Via webhooks the project will know the payment has completed, offering an experience just like any other web 2 check-out!

User-friendly deposits

We have seen that users find external webviews scary. This is why we are looking to offer in-app KYC and deposits through SEP 6 and 12.

Beans for Bitcoin

Users will be able to deposit and withdraw native Bitcoin through an integration with Coinqvest BTC (sep 6). This will allow users from the (large) Bitcoin community to use Beans as a Bitcoin payments app, buy BTC with cash, as well as "upgrade" their native Bitcoin to one that interoperates with Soroban smart contracts.

Send to phone numbers

By building on SEP 30 a user can send a payment that can be claimed by a new user during sign-up in a non-custodial way.

Integrate smartcontracts

By integrating Soroban we will be able to offer many new services. The first use-case we will integrate is recurring payments which our users will be able to set-up from within the app. To realise this, we will need to integrate with a .NET Soroban SDK. Currently, the elucidsoft SDK is implementing Soroban, but they said they're short on time. So we will research on how to help contributing to this SDK and take first steps towards a Soroban integration in Beans.

Thanks to the community support we have made significant progress:

• Implemented SEP-30 to allow for user friendly 2FA key management
• Implemented SEP-24 integration to allow bank on- and off-ramps
• Implemented QR code payments
• Implemented a referral program
• Integrated with Moneygram
• Integrated Stably for USD bank deposits
• Integrated Anclap for peso and Mykobo for Euro deposits
• Integrated payment requests through whatsapp
• Many UI updates
  

Next to that we have also realized new partnerships and did an initial marketing campaign to gather data:

• Partnerships with: Ntokens, Anclap, Mykobo, Stably, Moneygram, Ultrastellar
• Ran initial digital marketing campaigns in Spain/Argentina

As Soroban is introduced to Stellar, we expect many new, creative project to build on Stellar. The new products and services that Beans is launching are all aimed at creating a better user experience and improving interoperability. By achieving this, we can extend our seamless payments and on/off ramps to other projects and offer a better user experience for all. Furthermore, this will also provide a strong foundation to incorporate in-app smart-contract functionality.

Target Market

Our target customers have one or more of these problems:

• High inflation of their local currency.
• Low access to banking rails.
• High banking costs, for example through remittances.

Our initial target market will be South America, but we are aiming to roll out globally. In these countries many people encounter one or more of these problems. Also, these countries have good Stellar anchor coverage. One other group that might benefit from Beans are people that want to spend cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Lumens or Ethereum. In beans they can spend these at zero fee, even when their friends prefer to receive fiat.

For the remittance use-case we are targeting both the sender and the receiver. Someone in for example Argentina can use Beans to receive remittances in Peso and send/request them with local friends. Someone in the United States can set Beans in USD to send remittances to their family in Argentina at zero fee with near instant settlement.

Competition

With our product we are competing with a diverse set of players.

1. Remittance providers

On cross-border payments we’ll be competing with remittance providers like Western Union. Generally these companies offer good coverage, but high fees and slow processing times. In Beans, users will have no fees to send cross-border payments. These parties also don’t provide high yield savings accounts, something we can offer in Beans.

2. Payment apps

Apps like Venmo and cash.app have acquired a lot of users in countries like the US. However, in many countries, users don’t have access to apps like this. In many cash first countries, there is no winner on the payment side yet. Finally, these payment apps often don’t offer a way to convert into other currencies and earn yield.

3. Crypto yield apps

There are several non-custodial yield apps that focus on the general public, for example ZenGo or Argent do this. However, these apps can not provide (international) payments. The cost of the networks they run on are simply too high.

4. Centralized crypto payment apps

There are centralized solutions that offer crypto payments, for example Kasta is looking to do this. They can offer good UX, since they offer custodial solutions and don’t have to think about users managing private keys. However, these players will need to acquire licenses everywhere they launch, which is time consuming and costly. Finally, they are mainly focused on payments with crypto assets like Bitcoin. We will focus on payments with local stable coins, giving regular users a more familiar experience. More crypto native users can still use Beans to pay with BTC or XLM, their friends will automatically receive the fiat stablecoin of their choice.

Revenue model

To offer free payments, we will build our business model on savings and premium accounts. By providing a great user experience, we hope to take a small cut on savings rates or in the future yield from DeFi protocols. Beans will be free to use, while premium accounts will have access to premium features.

Partnerships

We have integrated with the following partners:

- Monegram (cash on/off)

- Stably (USD bank on/off)

- Anclap (ARS & PEN bank on/off)

- Mykobo (EUR bank on/off)

- Ntokens (BRL bank on/off)

- Ultrastellar (yield earning BTC, ETH, XLM and USDC)

Marketing

We ran initial marketing campaigns focused on senders/receives between Europe and Argentina. In the coming months we will start to ramp-up our marketing efforts with:

- Influencer marketing

- Paid campaigns (Instagram + Facebook)

- Reward program with referral bonuses and first time deposits bonuses

Partnerships

We have a partnership with Baseflow, a software development company that works for Google. This means we can easily scale up development and have access to the latest Flutter developments, as they maintain a portion of the SDK's. Next to that we are in active conversation with many of the anchors to bring Beans to their local communities. We see ourselves as a front-end to their services.

Our first deliverable has been completed. It was to enable our development application to switch seamlessly between SEP-24 and SEP-6 protocols through a database configuration. Additionally, the application will be capable of requesting the necessary fields from Coinqvest via a live SEP-6 connection. to get this setup we needed to:- Research the SEP-6 protocol- Create a flow diagram for a SEP-6 deposit- Update backend- Add option to dynamically switch between SEP-6 and SEP-24- Add the SEP-6 service to connect to the anchor their SEP-6 API

All of these steps have been completed.

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How can a reviewer check you completed your first deliverable?

We have recorded a demo video that shows this implementation. It can be accessed here. Please let us know any questions you might have.

Proof of intent demo video.

Flow diagram for SEP 6 deposits.