We're building an anchor to off-ramp Stellar USDC directly into GCash, the most popular e-wallet in the Philippines.

Cross-border remittance is notorious for high fees and inconvenience. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that recipients are often poor, underbanked, and are the least able to afford the fees and the time to deal with money agents. Crypto shows promise by removing some of the fees. Stellar's integration with Moneygram is another step in making crypto more usable for remittance. We believe there's a further opportunity to improve usability by off-ramping directly into a recipient's mobile e-wallet, and that's what we're building for this project.

Mobile money has existed for more than a decade, with M-PESA in Kenya being the first practical and well-known deployment. The idea has evolved, and mobile e-wallets such as Alipay in China and UPI in India have shown mobile money's new power given the recent ubiquity of smartphones. Many countries, such as the Philippines, have learned from China and India and have developed their local versions. And during the COVID lockdown, the adoption of these mobile e-wallets have exploded as everyone needed an alternative to physical cash. We see this as an opening to provide digital services to the unbanked that were previously stuck with the limitations of the cash economy. Cheap and convenient cross-border remittance is the next natural step to build for e-wallet users.

We’re building the anchor around the SEP-24 standard, so it will be compatible with all standard Stellar wallets. We plan to use Beans as the reference wallet as we have had the founder as our mentor during the SCF Startup Camp. Specifically, we plan to use Stellar's Anchor Platform for Hosted Deposits and Withdrawals to ensure standards compliance. On the other side, we're working with GCash to integrate the payment function to deposit Philippine pesos into a user's e-wallet.

From a user's point of view, within a Stellar wallet such as Beans, when choosing to cash out into Philippine pesos, we will show up as one of the options. After choosing us, if it's the first time the user uses Ripe, she'll be asked to provide her KYC and GCash account information. This naturally includes a phone number (which is how one identifies a GCash account), and we'll send an OTP to ensure the user's association with the phone number. Afterward, and in subsequent visits, she will simply be asked to enter the amount to cash out. Our service will clearly show the exchange rate and any associated fees.

We went through the Stellar SCF Startup Camp last month and took second prize. During the Camp we did a design sprint to research user needs as well as understand integration requirements. In particular we were matched with the founder of the Beans wallet as a mentor, so we've gotten direct pointers on what needs to be built for the integration.

Business Plan and Revenue Model
As an off-ramp, our revenue model will simply be a percentage fee of the transaction. Unlike traditional remittance providers, we leverage crypto and digital e-wallets to remove costly intermediaries (e.g., corresponding banks) and expensive physical distribution (e.g. Western Union networks), so our costs will naturally be lower. Our fee percentage should be closer to Visa/Mastercard (1-2%) than remittance networks like Western Union (5-10%).Given that more than $35B in remittance is sent to the Philippines each year, a 2% fee will make the Total Addressable Market (TAM) be $700m/year. Assuming we capture 10% of the market, our Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) will be $70m/year.

The first deliverable is the proper installation and configuration of Stellar's Anchor Platform in a cloud environment. We have done so by hosting it on AWS and configured our domain `stellar-anchor.ripe.money` to point to it. As the documentation only described how to install the Anchor Platform locally, we had to figure out a number of DevOps practices and changes to the sample configuration to run it in a cloud environment, including how to handle SSL certificates.

The configuration also includes information needed for standards SEP-1, SEP-10, and SEP-24. For SEP-24 we specifically target the withdrawal of USDC.
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How can a reviewer check you completed your first deliverable?

In the project proposal, we suggested the use of the Stellar Demo Wallet (https://demo-wallet.stellar.org/) to verify the setup of our Anchor Platform. Since then we had discovered the Stellar Anchor Validator (https://anchor-tests.stellar.org/) which does a full suite of tests to ensure an Anchor was set up correctly. Besides being a more comprehensive test, the Stellar Anchor Validator is also a simpler way for a reviewer to check our deliverable.

To verify our Proof of Intent:

1. Go to the Stellar Anchor Validator at https://anchor-tests.stellar.org/
2. Under the input for 'HOME DOMAIN', enter our domain name 'stellar-anchor.ripe.money' and click the button 'Fetch Stellar Info File'.
3. A dropdown menu will show up under the label 'SEP'. It's for selecting which sets of tests you want to run. There are three sets of tests: SEP-1, SEP-10, and SEP-24. Selecting 'SEP-24' will run all three sets of tests.
4. For the SEP-24 tests, you need to select an 'ASSET'. Choose USDC.
5. Click the button 'Run Tests' and wait for the results. There should be a total of 55 tests to check that the anchor is meeting spec.