Stellar Community Fund

By Blaze

Blaze

SCF #18

$90.0K

Legacy v4.0 Award

Awarded

Blaze is an international payments app carefully crafted for digital nomads and expats

Products & Services

Blaze is an international peer-to-peer payments app meticulously crafted for digital nomads and expats. It will utilize Stellar and Soroban to deliver swift, secure, and cost-effective transactions no matter where and with no matter whom a traveler may find themselves transacting. Conventional peer-to-peer providers such as Venmo excel in user experience, yet their functionality remains confined to their home country. Alternative solutions like PayPal, Wise, and Revolut enable international payments but can be cumbersome to use, overly expensive for simple transfers, or limited in their geographic accessibility. Blaze aspires to create an experience that merges the effortless and social user experience of Venmo with truly borderless accessibility made possible by the Stellar network's unique anchor ecosystem. While it's powered by crypto, Blaze is carefully designed to hide all the associated complexities from the everyday user. By doing so, and by obsessively focusing our user experience towards the nomad and expat lifestyles, we hope to significantly widen the utilization and reach of the Stellar network.

Simultaneously Non-Custodial, User-Friendly, and Highly Recoverable Blaze offers a payments experience centered around non-custodial wallets on Stellar without all the usual pitfalls. We will use Web3Auth to allow users to sign up and log in using SMS, Email, and pin code. In the future, we may augment our Web3Auth system with a parallel SEP-30 implementation for added security and mitigation of counterparty risk.

People-centric Payments One key feature of Venmo's success in North America is that it made the routine act of paying people into a social experience. Blaze will do the same for cross-border payments. We will feature a privacy-conscious social feed, a native friend graph as well as an integration with Instagram. Users will be able to pay each other using everyday identifiers like phone number or Instagram handle.

User-friendly Anchor Integrations Blaze will initially focus on user-friendly SEP6/SEP12 integrations of anchors in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, and Europe. In North America, Blaze is working with a key strategic infrastructure partner to implement a custom ramp.

Send and Receive for Free in Dollars. Think in Pesos. All in-app payments will happen in USDC, which reduces transaction costs, keeps the experience lightweight, and allows customers with volatile native currencies to benefit from holding dollars. We will use fee bumps and sponsored accounts to fully sponsor all in-app payments, keeping them free for users.

(Soroban) Give Back to the Communities You Visit Inspired by previous SCF grant winner "CashAbroad", Blaze will implement a smart contract that can add a donation on top of any other peer-to-peer payment on the network. The smart contract will maintain a verified directory of beneficiaries, as well as facilitate the actual payment-plus-donation transactions. The contract will be designed in such a way that any Soroban-connected project can make use of it, not just Blaze. For further details, please see the Additional Information section.

(Soroban) Account Specific Token Allowances Certain advanced features require moving funds on behalf of a user. We aim to do this without compromising user self-custody. Allowances on the native Stellar Asset Contract enable this but also expose a security threat. Through the allowances account, a hacker can steal large amounts of funds in one go. We will create a custom account contract that allows for recipient-scoped permissions. The allowances account will have permission to move funds only to specified recipients. That way a hacker would need to compromise both the allowance account and specified recipient accounts to steal money. Many projects in the Soroban ecosystem will be able to benefit from this increase in security. For further details, please see the Additional Information section.