Stellar Community Fund

By Bingtellar

Bingtellar

SCF #26

$30.0K

Legacy v5.0 Activation Award

Awarded

Bingtellar offers cross-border payments for individuals and business in Africa using Stellar-native stablecoins for low fees.

Products & Services

Bingtellar is simplifying cross-border payments for digital native Africans, African diasporas, remote teams, gig workers, and businesses (like Importers, SMEs). We make it fast, affordable, and easy for individuals and businesses to send and receive money across Africa and make payments.

Bingtellar has been live since 2023, serving customers in 5 African markets (Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda) with plans to expand to more regions by Q3 2024. We currently have 5,000 customers and 150 businesses onboarded, growing at 45% MoM, and more than 15 signed Letters of Intent from businesses looking to accept and make payments leveraging our on/off-ramp infrastructure.

Bingtellar’s vision is to bridge the gap between Web3 payments and the traditional financial system, making cryptocurrency spending and utility as easy and seamless as any other currency, providing an ecosystem shaped around users' everyday needs. With a web2 approach, our aim is to provide users a seamless experience in both traditional and digital financial services, with an emphasis on accessibility and security.

Why Is Bingtellar Needed?

Remittances serve as a crucial lifeline for 40% of the population in Africa. With rising globalization, there is a growing need for better ways to connect with the global economy, seamless cross-border transactions, and financial operations, which presents a $103bn market opportunity. This market is not yet served by incumbents like Wise, PayPal, and Western Union due to limitations in the underlying infrastructure and a lack of inclination to serve the African market.

Nearly 66% of Africans are either still unbanked or lack access to formal financial services and global payments. For remote workers, migrants, and cross-border traders, this is particularly challenging because they have no safe or reliable way to bring their money across borders or an affordable way to send and receive money, leaving them vulnerable to exploitative exchange rates and theft. Intra-Africa remittance corridors are the most expensive in the world, costing users up to 25% in fees and foreign exchange rates. Nevertheless, informal channels (like P2P and FX brokers) still process a huge chunk of transactions in sub-Saharan Africa because they figured out how to stay connected to local users. In the African market, customer convenience, better experience, and flexibility trump all other characteristics of remittance services.

This is where Bingtellar comes in. Our cross-border and payment product is not confined by state boundaries. With the platform, Bingtellar users can send money using both fiat and cryptocurrencies, swap multiple currencies, enjoy fast transfers, pay for goods and services, and more.

How it works:

Bingtellar is akin to a Wise for Africa, but with stablecoins and better, tailored to both crypto and non-crypto native users. Most blockchain-based products have targeted the crypto community, but we have taken a different approach and will target the everyday user by abstracting the complexities involved with blockchain transactions and crypto wallets. The beauty of Bingtellar’s design is that it does not impact the customer experience. No understanding of complex technical systems is required for non-crypto users. Users transact using local currencies they already know and trust (currently NGN, RWF, KES, GHS, and UGX) or crypto for crypto-friendly users. We have given users the flexibility to pick their preferred currency and process transactions. This currency will be used to send, request, and receive payments. All payments between users, no matter the currency, will auto-convert. No need to think about currencies or trustlines ever again. Payments are affordable, and we will even sponsor the network fees through feebumps.

We use Stellar’s Blockchain under-the-hood to facilitate all transactions and improve Bingtellar’s security and efficiency without complicating the user experience.

Problem Bingtellar solves:

Cross-border payments: Traditional fiat rails for cross-border payments can be slow (takes 4-7 working days), expensive (about 10-15% fees to receive payments), and complex (might need 2-3 apps + lots of intermediaries before final settlement to the bank). Unfortunately, platforms like PayPal and Wise, which could address these issues, are not tailored to the African market.

Crypto for everyday payments: One of the biggest blockers to why people cannot use or access crypto and utilize it for daily payments is because of platform user experience. A lot of platforms that support crypto do not have the best user experience, either too many steps and processes or just generally overly complex user interfaces. At Bingtellar, the crypto payments experience can be optimized to solve the crucial problems that customers face on a day-to-day basis, and we've built and continue to build an ecosystem of services within our platform that align with one of the Stellar ecosystem's core missions: real-world use-cases.

Crypto utility: With crypto adoption quickly rising in Africa, stables have become a great way for people to hedge against inflation and devaluation of local currency. However, most crypto platforms are built mostly as trading-only and crypto exchange platforms, which is extremely complex for non-crypto users that just want to access basic services, and this difficulty hinders adoption. In order to onboard the next billions of users into crypto or make holding digital assets as common as cash or using a debit card for payment, we need to optimize for one thing: "utility," and we are building with this in mind.

Cross-border trade: Selling products and collecting payments today from users in different African markets is very difficult for businesses due to the fragmented nature of payment systems across the continent. By streamlining payment processes, we empower businesses to boost their revenues and scale their operations without the complexities and anxieties traditionally associated with cross-border payments in Africa.

How Bingtellar solves these:

Bingtellar aspires to create an experience that merges the effortless user experience of Wise/Venmo with truly borderless accessibility made possible by the Stellar network's unique ecosystem. Our approach not only contributes to strengthening the Stellar ecosystem but also serves as a vehicle for financial inclusion and economic stability, offering communities a valuable tool to grow and participate in the global economy more securely and efficiently.

Through a series of external integrations with licensed partners, in addition to our continent-wide agents (P2P network) and institutional OTC infrastructure that acts as rails, Bingtellar is able to facilitate the movement of fiat and expand into new markets without a physical presence or its own licenses. Our core on and off-ramping experiences are fully native, never requiring a user to go through hurdles.

Customer-Facing Product:

With Bingtellar, freelancers, migrants, traders, and business owners access modern financial services from anywhere secured by Stellar. Bingtellar’s main functionality enables users to:

1. Send and receive money domestically and across borders (Try it out by signing up today!) 2. User Registration and KYC: Individuals register through the user interface and undergo a KYC verification process in line with regulatory requirements, facilitated by the SEP-0012 KYC Service, to ensure compliance with AML and KYC standards. 3. Exchange currencies 4. Cash in through local payment methods like bank and mobile money — We are adding Moneygram partner agents in Q4 2024 5. Cash out through bank and mobile money — We are adding Moneygram partner agents in Q4 2024 6. Manage the currencies they want to transact in 7. View their entire transaction history from account creation 8. View and update their profile information

Bingtellar & Stellar:

How Does Bingtellar Use Stellar?

Using Stellar helps Bingtellar reduce transaction costs, improve security, facilitate instantaneous transactions, and enhance transparency as a back-end system. Stellar is currently not a customer-facing technology; Stellar is the engine behind all transactions. Being built on Stellar enables us to access the blockchain’s benefits and also pass on the benefits of a blockchain-based system (including speed, transparency, and reduced costs) to customers without exposing them to volatility or a complex user experience. We create individual Stellar wallets for each user, and all transactions occur on-chain. That said, we do not hide the presence of blockchain from customers. As Bingtellar expands its network and to other anchors, additional currencies can be added to the front-end.

We are utilizing Soroban for Transaction Monitoring and for verified audit trails, ensuring data integrity and creating an on-chain audit trail. Soroban enables us to verify transactions, substantiate liquidity claims in peer-to-peer engagements, and facilitate service discovery. By leveraging Soroban, we strengthen security measures, mitigate risks, and uphold regulatory compliance standards. Additionally, Soroban's Account Specific Token Allowances feature empowers us to manage token allowances efficiently, enhancing user experience and operational effectiveness. Overall, Soroban plays a pivotal role in enhancing the reliability, transparency, and efficiency of our solution on the Stellar blockchain.

Why Is Bingtellar Valuable to Stellar?

Bingtellar aligns with Stellar’s mission: we focus on financial inclusion in emerging markets. We strive to make our services available and accessible, especially for the world’s most financially marginalized. Bingtellar offers inexpensive services to the financially excluded. We’ve already seen users in LATAM corridors use Bingtellar to remit money back home to their friends and families in Africa, which is very exciting.

Many companies promote using blockchain to benefit the underserved and unbanked, but few have been able to bring that idea to fruition. Our focus has been to build a product that feels like a regular web2 payment solution but uses blockchain behind the scenes. To do this, we have chosen to let users pick a preferred currency. This currency will be used to send, request, and receive payments.

From a technical perspective, Bingtellar is valuable to Stellar. As we grow, Bingtellar is planning to bring thousands of transactions to the network each month and expand Stellar into countries it has not been able to reach yet. As we move forward, we will become interoperable with other anchors in order to facilitate a truly global network of payments and currencies. Our customers are inherently mobile and moving across borders, so our vision is to support them — by using Stellar — anywhere they go.

Benefits:

Scalable Distribution:

With strategic alliances with commerce, SMEs, diaspora communities, and partnerships with financial institutions through OTC desks, we unlock a world of possibilities. These partnerships not only amplify our credibility but also extend our reach, granting broader access to Stellar USDC and XLM within a vast customer base.

Target Market:

Our initial target market will be Africa (to plug Stellar to Africa local payment rails and underserved communities), but we are aiming to roll out globally. In these countries, many people encounter one or more of these problems. Also, these countries have good Stellar anchor coverage. But by design, Bingtellar is a global product, which means the sender can send from anywhere in the world. A business owner or someone in, for example, Argentina can use Bingtellar to send remittances in USDC or XLM to their business partners, friends, or family in Kenya, and recipients would get Kenyan shillings in their Mpesa wallet at zero fee with near-instant settlement.

By targeting Sub-Saharan Africa, we bring a lot of new exposure to the Stellar Blockchain and the community. This, we believe, will bring in new users not only to Bingtellar but also to the Stellar network at large. Stellar's integration with Moneygram is a great step in making cash on/off-ramp more usable for remittance. However, there's an additional possibility to improve usability by on/off-ramping directly into the recipient's mobile money wallet, which is what we're building for this project.

Through Bingtellar, we bring real-world use-cases to the Stellar blockchain, allowing everyday users to use the Stellar blockchain for their everyday payments and transactions. This will further aid in creating a truly inclusive financial ecosystem that aligns with Stellar's mission to create equitable access to the global financial system.

Here is our Pitch showcase at the Africa Tech Summit 2024 in Nairobi: https://youtu.be/nwB46FSmK9I?si=NeT7503-sBio6Rgd. We didn't just highlight Bingtellar; we also emphasized the significance of Stellar USDC to the African community and how we're actively fostering its diverse applications.

Requested Budget

$30.0K

Team

We're a strong, high-performing and fast-moving team of engineers, designers & growth experts building the future of financial services for consumers and businesses in Africa.

(a). Name: Joshua Tebepina 

Position: Co-founder & CEO 

Bio: Joshua Tebepina is a serial technical founder with over a decade of software engineering experience, five years in Web3, and a proven track record building products at the intersection of finance, payments, and blockchain infrastructure (formally tagged the master of cross-border payments in Africa). Previously co-founded a software development agency that has built and scaled over 12 products to hundreds of thousands of users across different continents and he has worked at a number of startups outside of founding his own.

Deeply passionate about financial inclusion, Joshua has contributed to Ethereum, Celo and several other cryptocurrency projects communities and technology adoption in Africa has been instrumental in advancing Web3 adoption across Africa, both through hands-on development and community leadership. His contributions have earned him recognition as one of Africa’s Top 100 Web3 Leaders by Nodo, spotlighting his work in shaping the continent’s next-gen financial infrastructure. 

Skills: Software Engineer (Python, React and react native, Blockchain) BD & Partnership, Product design

LinkedIn - Joshua Tebepina | Joshua Headshot | Twitter - @jcbrizzy Github: https://github.com/jcdirect

(b). Name: Arepade Peremi 

Position: Co-founder & CTO 

Bio: Peremi is a serial founder with over 7+ years in Software Engineering. Ex Vatebra and has a very good experience and solid technical background in software development, payments, machine learning, and blockchain development and data analytics. He brings his wealth of experience to scale and grow the Bingtellar ecosystem to millions of users.

Skills: Software and System Engineer - Python and Django, Go, blockchain, Machine learning, systems design 

Expertise in building payment systems and managing transactions onchain and over 15+ other blockchain protocols. 

LinkedIn - Arepade Peremi | Peremi Headshot | Discord: Arepadeperemi#8092