SCF #13
Award Completed
Meru

USD Banking for Latin Americans over Stellar Blockchain

Awarded
Awarded
Budget request:
$
50,000
*
WebsiteCode

Project Stage

Growth

Category

Payments
DeFi
Wallets
Soroban

Based in

USA

Team size

2

Active since

Jun, 2021
Products & Services

We already have more than 10k registered users and more than 750K in transaction volume:

Here is evidence of our transactions through these wallets that are owned by us and we used them to perform our internal operations:

* https://stellar.expert/explorer/public/account/GDFVGIS3JBHN4HGKRIHE4XMS56DEOFEH6CXWCDNEALVDFVTO2S6OWQL5

* https://stellar.expert/explorer/public/account/GD2F5BNH5HSJSXXBBKM24UBMLPJEHAMBNXHVRRHSMA35XCKEMXVFPWZT

The main features we already have is

  1. USD Savings: In Latin America, it can be difficult to open a USD bank account, and the banks that do offer this service often require a high initial deposit. Meru solves this problem by allowing customers to deposit local currency, which is then used to mint USDc (USD coin) by Circle over the Stellar blockchain. Each user has their own Stellar wallet, so the USDc is deposited directly into their wallet.
  2. Low-cost International Money Transfers: Sending money between countries in Latin America can be difficult and expensive. Meru solves this problem by allowing customers to send money to more than 13 countries in the region. The app uses Stellar to send the payment from the user's wallet to Meru's treasury wallet. Meru then sends the money to the Stellar wallet of a partner company that handles liquidity in most of Latin America. This ensures fast and low-cost money transfers.
  3. Earn Up to 7% APY: Meru allows customers to earn up to 7% APY (annual percentage yield) on their investments. The app uses the yUSDC asset from UltraStellar to offer this feature. Customers can invest their money and earn interest without worrying about scams.
  4. Pay Utility Bills: Meru allows customers to pay their utility bills using their USDc balance. The app partners with a third-party company to exchange the USDc for local currency using the Stellar DEX platform through a local market maker.

We plan to add collateralized loans using Soroban and issuing a virtual/physical debit card.

No items found.
Previous Project(s)
SCF #11
Award recipient
Meru
Meru offers a simple way to allow instant and zero costs payments and remittances to migrants and freelancers in LatinAmerica
Learn more
SCF #10
Award recipient
Meru
Wise (Transferwise) for Latinamerica
Learn more
Progress so far

We participated in the SCF 11 and we didn't win. We launched officially in August of 2022. When we participated in the precious SCF we were too early and we have few users. Right now we have more than 10K registered users across Latin America and transacted more than 750K USD over Stellar Blockchain without any ad investment. Our application is in production in Google Play Store and App Store

Goals
To get there, we request a budget of  
$
50,000
*
  to:
Additional information

Our app has experienced rapid growth since the beginning of the year, and we are thrilled to see so many users benefiting from our product. However, with this growth comes the need for additional resources to keep up with demand.

As we continue to expand our offerings and improve our existing services, we require additional developers to join our team who help us to ensure that our product remains stable, secure, and user-friendly.

To support our growth and continue delivering high-quality services, we are seeking additional funding. This investment will enable us to scale our operations and hire additional developers to support our expanding user base.

Pitch deck
No items found.
Deliverables
First Deliverable

Migration of all the stellar infrastructure we have built to its own microservice.

In order to make it easy for people to take advantage of the benefits of Stellar Blockchain without needing to know anything about crypto, addresses, fees, etc. we have already implemented an infrastructure that allows our customers to interact with Stellar Blockchain in an easy way. So each user has their own Stellar address, but they don't need to have XLM or take care of this because we use sponsored reserves in order to allow each account to exist in Stellar and have trustlines with the assets we handle and we use transactions fee bumps to cover the fees needed by each transaction performed by each user in our app.

We implemented this in the main core service of the app (that handles everything in our app), which is not scalable.

Our first deliverable was to migrate everything related to Stellar to its own microservice. That includes stellar account creation ready to use, creating trustlines with assets, handling sponsored reserves, handling transactions fee bumps, and payments between accounts.

The steps followed were:

1) Created a new microservice in NodeJS and Typescript.

2) Migrated all the code related to this feature to the new microservice.

3) Created ELB in AWS

4) Created Auto Scaling Groups in AWS

5) Created a DynamoDB to save data related to this microservice

6) Created code deployment definitions in AWS to auto-deploy code when the master branch is updated.

7) Refactored the actual code in the main service in order to use the new microservice implemented.

8) Migrated actual data related to stellar accounts and saved it in an RDS Database to the new DynamoDB Table.

9) Deployed microservice

10) Deployed a testnet version of the microservice in a small server in AWS

11) Created a mini demo app deployed in Vercel to test the implementation in testnet (https://meru-non-custodial-demo-scf.vercel.app)

You can test the live application by downloading it:

* Android - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.getmeru.app&hl=es&gl=CO

* iOS - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/meru-ahorra-en-d%C3%B3lares/id1636697895

This deliverable allowed us to have better performance overall related to stellar and have fewer failure points. Because right now if the monolithic server gets down, everything gets down.


Reviewer instructions

We already implemented this migration.

We offer two ways to check it out:

1) A video call in order to show the actual implementation, showing code, AWS infrastructure, etc.

2) We have deployed a mini demo application in Vercel that is connected to the actual implementation, but in testnet, where we demo how the service allows creating a Stellar account sponsored by our reserve accounts, is possible to create trustline with USDC without having XLM, and send USDC payment to another account without having XLM because the XLM fees are paid through fee bumps by our accounts in the service logic. This demo app is super minimalist and is connected to Testnet. (https://meru-non-custodial-demo-scf.vercel.app/)

======== UPDATE

Here we upload two videos as per your request. This one https://youtu.be/yEw7QZ9Y8oo is for the mini demo app where we show how our implementation allows creating Stellar accounts ready to use and with trustline with USDC and allows to receive payments from to accounts without the need of holding XLM. 

This other video https://youtu.be/-X6R-xJJIJE is a demo of our application up and running in production.

You can use these credentials to use the app in production:

user: admin@piiddo.com

password: userTest.@1


Here I send you the public repo of the mini demo app written in React/Typescript.

https://github.com/ajoseerazo/meru-non-custodial-demo-scf

Is important to mention that the demo is in Testnet and has some assumptions in order to make it easy to use for demo purposes.

Links:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.getmeru.app&hl=es&gl=CO
R3mit Solutions Inc

R3mit solutions offer a variety of financial products to Latin Americans

Team

Amilcar Erazo (kirckz (Meru)#8606)

CTO/CEO

Born in Venezuela, with more than 10 years developing software. Worked as Senior Software Engineer in companies like NuBank and RappiPay.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/amilcar-jose-erazo-perdomo-721a1a65/

Carlos Neira

CEO/Advisor

Born in Colombia, with more than 30 years of experience in the tech field. Worked at companies such as IBM and Intel. Fintech Entrepreneur in Colombia with a successful company (Cajero.co) that offers mobile POS to SMBs.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlos-neira-a1a44548/

Yoser Rodriguez

Born in Venezuela, Industrial Engineer. Founded a remittances company (Remepagos) that operated for over two years, sending remittances from Colombia to Venezuela. Crypto Trader