SCF #15
Under review
Unalivio Stablecoin payouts
by

Unalivio is a payments method that allows migrants to pay families’ bills from abroad with stablecoins, increasing sales for SMEs

Awarded
Awarded
Budget request:
$
111,100
*
WebsiteCode

Project Stage

Introduction

Category

Soroban
Payments

Based in

Team size

4

Active since

Products & Services

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:

  • The person paying the bill and the person receiving the bill are in different countries;
  • At the immediate moment of settlement, merchant gets paid in USDC on Stellar,
  • There is an added incentive for usage triggered by a smart contract (More use = larger incentive).

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:

  • Migrant abroad: Able to pay for their family’s needs back home, and knows their money is spent where it needs to go.
  • Family back home: Gets their first needs Bills paid.
  • Small business: Gets extra sales, paid in a Dollar-backed stablecoin, giving the business access to USD savings.

Customer journey:

  1. The process starts with the Unalivio payments system, displaying offers from a range of clinics, and products from those clinics. (We start with one segment, then expand)  
  2. The next step is payment; done through a regular cash-in integration with a payments gateway (e.g. Moonpay). We can technically accept payments around the world, but for legal simplicity we will not start in the US.
  3. The ecosystem is managed with an internal admin panel. With sign ups handled with the Unalivio team, for vetting, doing KYB, and enabling service providers.
  4. After every completed transaction, the service provider is paid, leveraging the low cost, and immediateness of Stellar classic.

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.

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Previous Project(s)
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Progress so far
Goals
To get there, we request a budget of  
$
111,100
*
  to:
Additional information

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.

Pitch deck
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Deliverables
First Deliverable

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.

  • The first stakeholder is the service provider; for this stage they are doctors who offer consultations.
  • The second is the end user (or patient) who receives the consultation and requests someone abroad to make the payment on their behalf.
  • Lastly, the payer is responsible for receiving the payment request from the system, on behalf of the end user, and conducting the necessary checks before making the payment.

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:

  1. Anyone can register on the unalivio system in a intuitive way. Registration is completed in seconds, and done via Gmail authentication for now. And we expect initial registrants to be end users, and service providers (Doctor’s admin office employees)

2) Order creation:

  1. Registered users create an order on the Unalivio website;
  2. The Initial services included are: Doctor consultations, various health tests.

3) Order payment

  1. That order, can be paid immediately on the website using a debit/credit card, with an amazon-like UX;
  2. Today we have one initial cash in provider, this will be complemented by locally optimized options.

4) Order sharing

  1. Once an order has been created, the registered user can pay for it if the person has a Visa or Mastercard regular card, OR
  2. The created order can be shared, so a third party can pay it from anywhere else around the world by following the link and instructions.
  3. Initially, the sharing method is only email. This will be expanded in the future.

5) Back end admin & controls:

  1. The system Informs the doctor about requested and paid orders on a dedicated Dashboard. Service provider administrators manually select to move an order from paid to completed, once a service has been provided.
  2. Payouts in USDC will be triggered manually at this point; this is triggered when an admin user clicks on “RETIRAR” (withdraw) and is prompted to input their wallet and details on their individual user panel.


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:

  1. Login with Gmail (password creation is not enabled now)
  2. Select the category, merchant and service to request from the dropdown menu (Categoría, comercio, servicio)
  3. The price gets automatically populated, so an user should confirm the price and then
  4. Create an order.
  5. Once the order is created they go to the next page where they have two options:

           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:

  1. Log onto https://affiliates.unalivio.com/login-commerce, and proceed as the clinic or service provider would, meaning they will now check the requested service has been processed and paid by the payment party. In order to do this, the user should have
  2. created a user and password, so they can log into their account one unalivio; for the purposes of this demonstration the https://affiliates.unalivio.com/login-commerce is taking you to a preset user with a filled in password, for the Fabian Farinas clinic as an example.
  3. The clinic has two menus to look into, Historial de órdenes and Fondos:

             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.

Team

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.

  • Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/contrerasernesto/
  • Twitter: https://twitter.com/ernestocontrer


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.