Stellar Community Fund

By Meru

Meru - Beyond Latin America

SCF #25

$98.5K

Legacy v5.0 Community Award

Awarded

Expanding coverage of Meru financial services for freelancers based on Stellar beyond Latin America, Spanish-speaking, and USDC.

Products & Services

Meru is a non-custodial USDc digital wallet built and designed for freelancers and remote workers from Latin America, built over Stellar. Now we want to expand this to other emerging countries, such as India, Pakistan, Philippines, Bangladesh, etc., who have a very important presence of freelancer workers who work not only for the US but also for European companies. For this we need: Complement our KYC partner capabilities to have global coverage. Enable SEPA virtual bank accounts for non-EU residents, that settle in EURC (Stellar). Enable Mastercard/Visa issuance for global customers. Connect other on-ramp and off-ramp rails to at least 10 more countries outside Latam.

Regarding studies around 1.56Bn people work as self-employed or freelancers in the world (https://techjury.net/blog/freelance-statistics/). Freelancers and remote workers commonly engage with remote employers through platforms like UpWork, Workana, Freelancer.com, Fiverr, etc. But getting paid internationally is still too hard. Most platforms pay in dollars or euros and leave the worker to figure out how to get that money into local currency to be available to spend on essentials like rent, food, medicines, wifi, etc., losing money paying high fees, having to use multiple platforms to convert the money to local currency, waiting long times, or being scammed.

Total flexibility to receive deposits, send or spend money with Meru, thanks to our non-custodial solution based on USDC/EURC on Stellar.

We have been working with SDF for more than 3 years. Meru has been built on Stellar. All the products offered by us are running on Stellar. When a Fiat payment is received it is converted to USDC/EURC and deposited in a non-custodial wallet owned by each user. We perform gas sponsorship, and fee bump transactions, to simplify adoption, and additionally, we have a key management and recovery system based on the SEP-30 protocol. We have our own instance of Horizon. We use SEP-6 and SEP-24 to integrate with Stellar anchors, such as Moneygram.