Stellar Community Fund

By Unalivio

USDC payments for LatAm stores

SCF #29

$49.3K

Legacy v5.0 Community Award

Awarded

Making online sales is hard for many retailers in LatAm. With Unalivio, merchants can perform digital sales and get paid in USDC

Products & Services

Unalivio is an online payments tool for brick-and-mortar retailers, and a cross border payments system. Unalivio pays out in USDC because it is specifically made for LatAm. Unalivio allows users to pay for goods for their family abroad in a direct transaction to the merchant, instead of sending money that needs to be picked up. With Unalivio, users create a ticket that can be shared and paid from around the world. The payer uses local currency through a cash-in partner, or crypto. Once the payment is verified, the system notifies all parties involved and transfers USDC to the vendor account. To complete the loop, vendors review transactions, administrative details and withdraw funds as USDC on Stellar.

Not long ago, I received a worrisome phone call from my friend Luis in Dubai. He intended to pay $2,000 USD for his father’s surgery in Venezuela, but his Zelle was blocked when he attempted to make the transfer! The bank blocked the transaction because it decided this was an unauthorized use, even though everything was ready! The doctor, hospital, nurses, and of course his father!! Because they were in a part of the world that is not connected to the USD financial system, they had to go through time consuming hurdles in order to use their own money in a life-or-death situation. He called me because he remembered what we are building with Unalivio, and within minutes we did the cash in, created an account for the doctor’s office and let them receive confirmation of funds. Thankfully Luis’ dad is ok, and we got reassurance of WHY we are building these solutions.

Each year 138 Billion Dollars are sent to LatAm; and in Venezuela, our sandbox market, 7 million migrants sent 4.5 Billion Dollars in remittances in 2023. And for traditional retailers, making online transactions is hard, and making cross border transactions is almost impossible!

At the core of our system, we use USDC on Stellar to move funds around Latam with this stablecoin. We collect funds from around LatAm with our network of Stellar anchor, Crypto payment cash in, and other payment rails, convert them into USDC and pay our affiliated merchants on USDC. We also expand Stellar's use case by enabling cash-in payments with USDC on Stellar at hundreds of locations, creating a tool that is both valuable and sustainable real-world problem-solving.

To grow and incentivize usage, we are implementing a counter system to measure and analyze incentives. As part of our launch we tested discounts and cashbacks for payments. We will be launching direct integration into wallets as our pilot integration into Beans App, because we want to incentivize the thousands of users they have with Venezuelan ties in order to promote Stellar payments exclusively.