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We will be building the “Unalivio cash out system for USDC on Stellar”; This system is the method in which small and medium businesses will be paid in USDC for the services provided to end users, paid by their migrant relatives abroad.
The system resembles a bill payout system except:
Unalivio is focused on migrant individuals that want to support their loved ones back home; the Stellar component makes the payment efficient for SMEs, and the Soroban smart contract incentivizes usage.
The Unalivio system, solves problems for the three key stakeholders in our cross-border-payment scheme:
Customer journey:
The Soroban component works to promote usage of Stellar after the cash out process is finished (See attached Architecture).
After completing cash-in, and pay outs, the Smart contract on Soroban gets triggered. This allows additional benefits to the Service provider segment of users (those who get paid, eg: medical providers), as a way to incentivize them to prefer Stellar over other cash out options. This solution is inspired by the Donation functionality of Cash abroad, with the variantion that for Unalivio, the smart contract (Soroban) executes incentives per usage, by initially following the following principles:
-On a First time usage the service provider withdraws on USDC, they will get 5 USD extra in stellar lumens (or USDC)
-On the Fifth time the service providers can get 15 USD extra
-And so on.
These incentives are a key feature to grow our network, and provide an automated way to deploy incentives. As our network grows, this will resemble a miles loyalty program, where users are eligible to certain benefits per threshold achieved.
Insights and initial market size
Most times the amount of money sent back home is not enough, every time a remittance is sent, there is a fee paid to the middleman; and in financially distressed countries, remittance fees are as expensive as 20% of the total amount sent. It also usually requires trusting money to someone in the middle, who could disappear or delay the transfer of the funds.
Despite these challenges, $142 Billion U.S. Dollars are sent back to LatAm homes every year, by approximately 30 Million latinos who have migrated around the Latin American region. Just Venezuela, El Salvador and Guatemala, account for a remittance market of over $30 Billion U.S. Dollars.
Dollars are by far the preferred currency for emerging markets, as Latinos distrust their local currencies, which are affected by inflation, and face limitations to access global markets.
With Unalivio, users can take comfort in knowing 100% of their funds will go towards their intended purpose and the user will also be notified when the payment has been fully completed.
By enabling the Soroban smart contract to build Unalivio an incentive sales tool, the Unalivio USDC payouts, will massively push forward the crypto ecosystem, as it not only solves a huge pain point for users and SMEs, but it also serves as a liquidity source deposit fresh USDC to the local crypto circular economies.
In the past, with the Dash Network, I implemented a payroll solution on Church’s chicken Venezuela, and we increased adoption by rewarding users who behaved in a certain way (In this case was to spend Dash instead of cashing out), but we had to do this manually as Dash does not have smart contract functionality. With Soroban, we do not need to rely on manual verification, as it happens automatically, for those wallets that completed a certain amount of transactions (And these targets can be modified during our growth journey)
Unalivio launched our pilot program in Venezuela, because the need is massive, the willingness to accept cryptocurrencies is one of the highest in the world, and there are very few competitors.
We will grow beyond this jurisdiction after achieving initial scale.
Marketing and Go-To-market strategy:
Both Ernesto and Antonio have been working in the crypto payments and solutions space for more than 5 years each, and have developed a broad network of organizations, teams & merchants that will be leveraged to grow Unalivio;
Antonio's previous startup Glufco developed a P2P and payments solution that was used by over 15,000 individuals as it was tailored to the local needs of Venezuela (read more here); on the other hand
Ernesto, has launched Dash initiatives in LatAm & Venezuela since 2018, including onboarding Church’s Chicken Venezuela, as the first fast food chain the the world to accept Crypto in all locations; he also onboarded leading chains of supermarkets such as the Excelsior Gama chain of stores.
With these learnings, adapting them to Unalivio products, we developed the following GTM plan, which consists of a two-pronged approach for growth:
Online-services Vertical: Our beta product is called “Unalivio Services”. This is currently operational and allows to pay for online services, starting with top up payments in Venezuela. Launched four weeks ago for closed testing, we have acquired a few resellers and over a hundred users despite it being aimed to debugging and finding initial pmf. The service vertical is a low margin product, but its main contribution will be to get us distribution and brand recognition.
The second vertical is the remittance-services vertical: We are working with our first partner clinic in order to enable the Unalivio payments method so they can allow their users to request international payments.
Once our MVP is tested on this launch clinic, we will add more service providers to our network by hiring medical representatives, starting in the 2 largest cities. This will allow us to onboard at least 2 dozen clinics in the next quarters. Our initial grow will be achieved by increasing geographical distribution.
At this stage, our customer acquisition will be driven with a B2B growth approach; so we will deploy our marketing actions directly at the point of interaction, by training cashiers, creating point of sale material such as stickers, booklets and other in store promotions so users arec converted directly at the moment of payment. .
We will also continue to grow our social media for brand awareness, focused on our instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/somosunalivio/ which now holds almost 4,000 followers, and validates our product legitimacy.
End users get the product offered at their point of use, and payers can get acquainted with the product because they have seen our ads on social media, and depending on our growth we could sponsor some local migrant events.
Our initial deliverable consists of a fully functional Minimum Viable Product (MVP) integrated with the preliminary Payment gateway serving as a Cash-in system. This integration allows paying users to utilize their existing legacy system cards to make payments for the desired services. Additionally, service providers can verify that the requested service has been initiated and approved by the platform before proceeding to provide it to the end user.
It is important to note that Unalivio operates as a B2B2C platform, and it involves three key stakeholders per each transaction.
Our first deliverable encompasses five primary functions: Login, order creation, order sharing, order payment and admin controls. For anyone to be able to validate this process is working, is the first deliverable:
Our first deliverable allows for five functions:
1) User registration:
2) Order creation:
3) Order payment
4) Order sharing
5) Back end admin & controls:
Please note that the process of actual payouts of USDC on Stellar is conducted manually at this stage.
How can a reviewer check you completed your first deliverable?
For a reviewer to check completion for Unalivio first deliverable, they can check two different processes:
To check for end user system:
Log onto https://services.unalivio.com/login; and initiate the order creation process as a payer would:
Option one: The user can pay for the service. For demonstration purposes, Stellar reviewers can use the generic test card, numbered 4242 4242 4242 4242, exp date 12/25 and CVC 123.
Option two: Share the order so someone else will pay for the service. In order to do this, the user will click the COMPARTIR blue button on the top right corner of the screen, and input the email of the person they are requesting the payment to. After the email is input, the paying party will receive an email and proceed directy onto the Part 5.a of this list.
6. After the card numbers are input, a user just needs to Press pay and will be notified of a compete payment of the order or a problem with the card.
To check the process from the side of the clinic, the reviewers should:
Historial de órdenes: Order book with every order the clinic has received, been paid and completed
When the user hovers to the Historial part of the website, The clinic will be able to and then validate the status of the order; and they could be:
-Created: A user has made the order, but no action has been taken yet.
-Paid: A user has made the order, and it has been paid. The Doctor can proceed to provide the contracted service .
-Completed: An order has been paid, and the user received the service at the clinic. At this moment, the clinic manually changes the status from paid to completed. The Unalivio system backend has received and processed the payment from the paying user, and at this moment the balance is moved into the Doctors account, and it is now ready to be paid out to the doctor as agreed with the service provided terms.
Fondos: Fund wallet, showing the USDC the doctor has received as a result of orders completed within the unalivio system.
-When the user hovers to the fondos part of their admin site, The clinic will be able to see the amount of collections they have received as a result of their work, and press “RETIRAR” or withdraw funds as they like to.
-Once the withdraw funds button is clicked, the user selects USDC network, and inputs the wallet details and any other relevant information to be sent over to the unalivio administrative team.
This request is processed manually (for now), as this is what will be automated depending on the agreements with the doctors, their time preference for payments; and in order to do this we will be using Soroban, wallet integrations, and other tools.
You can see a step by step guide with screenshots on this link. This last step completes the verification step for the Unalivio stablecoins payout POI.
Ernesto Contreras- Co-Founder & CEO | Discord: Ernesto_Contreras#6223
Ernesto is the CEO and co-founder of Unalivio; he is a Growth Director with 18 years of professional experience, seven of them full time in crypto; he has developed a unique network and track record of building real world usability, integrations and applications in the crypto industry.
Ernesto has grown projects all around the world, especially in emerging markets; where crypto thrives because there is a need for its use.
Born in Venezuela, he has lived and worked in China, The United States, Venezuela, Ukraine, and for the past 10 years in Mexico, where he has developed a broad network in the regional crypto currency industry.
Ernesto is an early Bitso marketing manager, and he was named one of the Top influential builders in crypto for Latin America in 2022 and 2020 by Beincrypto Magazine.
Antonio DiCaprio Co-Founder & CTO | Discord: [DK]#0487
Antonio is a Venezuela electronic Engineer, the former co-founder and technical leader for the Venezuelan fintech firm Glufco. Before his venture into Fintech he worked for fourteen yeas as a specialist in automation and control in the oil industry in Venezuela.
Antonio discovered Bitcoin in 2016, and has learned by building in the different segments in the industry since then. He has Mined, done trading, created NFT collections, developed payment systems and most recently developed financial services with the technology.
He is also a co-founder for the Chiguireland collection on Polygon. Chiguireland is home to around 4,000 Capibaras that live on the Polygon Blockchain and allow their holders to join crypto discussions, opportunities and games on their discord server.
On his free time, Antonio is developing a Chiguireland associated game on Unity, and he has been developing algorightmic trading tools on Python & Pine Script.
Fabian Fariñas; Founding member- Lead Developer
Fabian is a Lead developer and systems engineer with an informations technology background from Universidad de Oriente (VE), focused in backend development.
Experienced with Laravel,NodeJs and Golang, basic product design and experiencied with integrations of blockchains like Bitcoin, Tron and Solidity smart contracts.
Fabian has developed Financial and payment Apps such as Glufco, where he worked for five years next to our co-founder Antonio; fabian has also worked developing first generation OTC exchanges, NFT art collections in ERC721 - ERC1155 and multiple smart contracts in Solidity.
Victor Quiroga; Founding member - Data Scientist
Victor is a Data scientist with 8 years experience in Fintech, developing tools for Data & Analytics, Machine Learning, AML & Compliance.
He has worked develping key technical components for multiple fintech projects in Mexico, including the startup Isbit exchange and the Albo unicorn financial service app. He works developing backend components and Data collecting, analysis and models including BigData infrastructure, through hierarchical clustering over the share correlation matrices, using PySpark, R Plot.ly and PowerBI.
His experience includes building NFT smart contracts for projects as well as consulting for companies and entrepreneurs that want to build their MVPs.
The USD valuation of the budget request in XLM will be calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on December 5, 2022 as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker “XLMUSD_RR”) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR). Learn more in the SCF Handbook.
*The USD valuation of the award in XLM is calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on July 5th as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker “XLMUSD_RR”) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR)
**The USD valuation of the award in XLM is calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on December 16, 2021 as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker “XLMUSD_RR”) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR)
*The USD valuation of the award in XLM is calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on September 27, 2021 as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker “XLMUSD_RR”) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR)
* The USD valuation of the award in XLM is calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on the date of transfer as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker “XLMUSD_RR”) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR)
*This budget request has not been fully awarded to the project. The USD valuation of the budget request in XLM will be calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on day of payment as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker “XLMUSD_RR”) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR). Learn more in the SCF Handbook.
*This budget request has been awarded to the project in XLM. The USD valuation of the budget request in XLM will be calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on day of payment as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker “XLMUSD_RR”) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR). Learn more in the SCF Handbook.
*This budget request has not been fully awarded to the project. The USD valuation of the budget request in XLM will be calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on day of payment as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker “XLMUSD_RR”) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR). Learn more in the SCF Handbook.
*This budget request has not been fully awarded to the project. The USD valuation of the budget request in XLM will be calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on day of payment as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker “XLMUSD_RR”) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR). Learn more in the SCF Handbook.
*This budget request has not been fully awarded to the project. The USD valuation of the budget request in XLM will be calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on day of payment as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker “XLMUSD_RR”) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR). Learn more in the SCF Handbook.