Stellar Community Fund

By Kutana

Insurance Embedded Escrow for B2B Trade

SCF #45

$97.0K

Build

Awarded

Products & Services

Kutana is a B2B cross-border trade platform for African SMEs. Our product Trade Secure provides milestone-based escrow with embedded insurance for import and export deals. Buyers fund an escrow, sellers ship, funds release per milestone, and the whole deal is underwritten by our insurance partners.

We are now moving our solution on-chain. Escrow will be held in USDC on Stellar through Trustless Work’s audited contracts, milestone releases will be triggered by attested trade events, KYB status will be attested on-chain, and every deal will have a public, indexer-backed view that our users and partner banks can independently verify. We will also integrate with Bridge to off ramp for last mile settlement. This award funds a new integration layer, built as modules inside our existing service and following the patterns we already run in production:

Deal event outbox. Every deal lifecycle event (created, funded, shipped, delivery confirmed, disputed) is written transactionally to an outbox table and dispatched by our existing background workers. This extends the transactional-outbox pattern we already use for payments.
Escrow integration module. Deploys a Trustless Work multi-release escrow per accepted deal, funds it in USDC, and drives per-milestone release.
Trade Event Attestation Service. Converts verified trade events into signed attestations that call Trustless Work’s approve-milestone and release endpoints. It is a single trusted attester in v1, with every attestation publicly auditable.
Signing Service. The only separately deployed component. It holds all Stellar role keys (approver, release signer, dispute resolver, treasury) in cloud key-vault storage and signs every transaction. Our SME users never touch a wallet.
KYB Attestation Registry. A small Soroban contract, open-sourced, that maps Stellar addresses to KYB status covering status, tier, expiry, and revocation. Deal creation requires both counterparties to hold a valid attestation. No personal data goes on-chain.
Insurance policy record. A small Soroban contract, open-sourced, holding the on- chain record of policy issuance, claim decisions, and payout receipts. Adjudication stays off-chain.
Deal Indexer and read API. Ingests contract events from Stellar RPC into our database and serves a REST read API, providing an on-chain status view in our web app and an authenticated endpoint for partner banks.

Requested Budget

$97.0K

Traction Evidence

Transacted over $10m in payments in 2026. Evidence shows our ERC20 and TRC20 wallet activity and a bank statement from Ghana showing we have processed 78m GHS this year - https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1_UBUj2tQaxOF3BqUZC8tHJtXPzsuclpX?usp=sharing
Only emerging markets FinTech to be selected for the JP Morgan FinTech Accelerator.
Finalists at the Entrepreneurship World Cup (Over 10k applications).
Partnered with largest insurance company in Africa to launch a new financial product to reduce cross-border trade risk.

Tranche 1 (Deliverable Roadmap) - MVP

All estimates reflect AI-assisted development at a blended rate of $62.50 per hour, below market rates for payments and Soroban engineering. Testing is broken out explicitly in every tranche. Audit costs are excluded per the SCF Budget Guidelines (SDF Audit Bank at testnet, self-funded review as fallback). Platform hardening, the insurance data model, and the Signing Service security review are self-funded by KutanaPay as co-investment. The two clocks that do not compress, Bridge business onboarding and the 90-day pilot, run in parallel with engineering and after launch, respectively.

Tranche 1: Testnet foundations ($32,000)

Core integration plumbing, proven end-to-end on the testnet before anything else is built on it.

Deal event outbox engineering (transactional writes across all eight lifecycle transitions, dispatcher with retry, stuck-entry recovery, per-deal ordering) — 80 hours × $62.50 = $5,000
Signing Service engineering (key-vault custody integration, sign-and-submit API, per-role access policies, key generation and rotation procedures, signing audit log; security-sensitive code held to human review)—96 hours × $62.50 = $6,000
Trustless Work escrow integration engineering (per-deal escrow deployment driven by outbox events; funding, milestone approval, and release flows through the Signing Service; dominated by integration debugging rather than code volume) — 112 hours × $62.50 = $7,000
Idempotency and reconciliation engineering (idempotency keys on all escrow-touching operations, 15-minute reconciliation of platform state against on-chain state with divergence alerting) — 48 hours × $62.50 = $3,000
Integration-layer observability (Prometheus metrics on outbox depth, stuck entries, dispatch failures, and reconciliation divergence; dashboards, alert rules, worker liveness detection, and correlated structured logging)—48 hours × $62.50 = $3,000
Fault-injection, integration, and load testing (worker-kill recovery, double-funding and double-release protection, 3x pilot event volume, staging key-rotation drill, divergence drills)—96 hours × $62.50 = $6,000
Demo package and tranche documentation (testnet contract identifiers, transaction hashes, recorded lifecycle demo, rotation procedure document)—32 hours × $62.50 = $2,000

Deliverables: Deal lifecycle events emitted transactionally with exactly-once processing; a deployed Signing Service holding all four Stellar role keys in cloud key vault with no key material in code, configuration, or on disk; a complete Trustless Work loop on testnet in which accepting a deal deploys an escrow matching its milestone schedule, funds it in testnet USDC, and approves and releases a milestone end to end from real platform actions; idempotent escrow operations with automated reconciliation; dashboards and alerts live on every integration component.

Verification: Repository and test-suite links; published testnet contract identifiers and transaction hashes for a complete deal; a demo video walking one deal from acceptance to release; recordings of the worker-kill and divergence drills producing operator alerts; the executed key-rotation procedure document.

Tranche 2 (Deliverable Roadmap) - Testnet

Tranche 2: Attestation, contracts, and visibility ($40,000)

The trust layer: attested releases, on-chain KYB gating, the insurance record, and the surfaces through which users and partner banks see it all.

Trade Event Attestation Service engineering (SEP-53 attestation engine, outbox consumer, replay protection backed by a persisted event-identifier store, quarantine path, lag monitoring, public attestation log) — 112 hours × $62.50 = $7,000
KYB Attestation Registry Soroban contract engineering (status, tier, expiry, revocation; SEP-46 contract metadata and SEP-48 interface specification; Apache-2.0) — 112 hours × $62.50 = $7,000
KYB registry writer and deal-creation gating (KYB approval to on-chain attestation within one worker cycle, revocation on withdrawal, both-party gating with clear user-facing messaging) — 64 hours × $62.50 = $4,000
Insurance Record Soroban contract and hooks (policy issuance, claim decisions, and payout receipts for SanlamAllianz-underwritten policies recorded on-chain as hashes and statuses, written only through the Signing Service; SEP-46 and SEP-48; Apache-2.0) — 80 hours × $62.50 = $5,000
Deal Indexer and read API engineering (contract-event ingestion from Stellar RPC with outage catch-up, read API for the web application, authenticated partner endpoint with per-partner credentials, rate limiting, and access logging) — 112 hours × $62.50 = $7,000
Web application on-chain deal experience (on-chain status panel with explorer links, live escrow balance, milestone and attestation state, KYB standing, funding-flow updates, real-time updates over existing server-sent-events infrastructure extended to deal pages) — 64 hours × $62.50 = $4,000
Contract test suites and integration and load testing (unauthorized-writer rejection, expiry and revocation enforcement, replay protection, indexer catch-up after simulated outage, read API at 3x pilot traffic with p95 under 500 ms) — 80 hours × $62.50 = $5,000
QA and moderated usability session with at least five existing customers—16 hours × $62.50 = $1,000

Deliverables: A buyer confirming delivery on staging produces a signed attestation and the matching on-chain milestone approval with no manual step between, verifiable with standard Stellar tooling using only public information; deal creation gated on both counterparties holding valid on-chain KYB attestations; insurance policy, claim, and payout records retrievable from chain and matched to off-chain records by hash; indexed on-chain state served to the web application and to partner banks through an authenticated API; a deal page a user who knows nothing about blockchain can follow from funding to release. Both contracts are open-sourced under Apache-2.0 with published interfaces. The testnet launch completes this tranche, and with it our application to the SDF Audit Bank; we will also move forward with internally funded audit work if needed so it never acts as a blocker.

Verification: End-to-end testnet demo of a real platform action producing an on-chain release; live verification of an attestation with standard tooling; open-source contract repositories with interface documentation; testnet attestation transactions and the recorded deal-creation gate in blocked and permitted cases; a live authenticated call to the partner endpoint; screen recordings of the full deal journey in the staging web app; the usability session summary.

Tranche 3 (Deliverable Roadmap) - Mainnet

Tranche 3: Mainnet launch ($25,000)

Production launch narrowed to reduce execution risk.

Bridge treasury ramp integration engineering (business onboarding wired to a provisioned virtual account, USD-to-USDC funding flow into the Signing-Service-held treasury, USDC-to-USD redemption through existing rails, bounded treasury float with documented rebalancing thresholds, SEP-29 memo checks, HMAC-SHA256 callback verification, conversion replay protection) — 128 hours × $62.50 = $8,000
Mainnet deployment and release engineering (both authored contracts deployed and the escrow integration configured against the Trustless Work mainnet)—80 hours × $62.50 = $5,000
Migration switches, rollout controls, and operator runbooks (eligible USD-denominated deals routed on-chain behind switches; runbooks for stuck deals, divergence, and disputes)—64 hours × $62.50 = $4,000
Monitoring, alerting, and launch drills (dashboards for outbox depth, attestation lag, indexer lag, reconciliation divergence, and Signing Service errors; divergence alerts wired to an on-call rotation; runbook drills) — 48 hours × $62.50 = $3,000
QA, load testing, and pilot validation (full event-to-chain pipeline at 3x expected pilot volume before general availability; 15-minute reconciliation of the fiat and USDC legs of every conversion with a daily summary report) — 48 hours × $62.50 = $3,000
Documentation and open-source release (contract repositories with interface specifications, architecture-level integration guide for driving Trustless Work escrow from deal events, partner API documentation, and public verification page) — 32 hours × $62.50 = $2,000

Deliverables: Trade Secure deals running on Stellar mainnet for real users in a pilot confined to USD-denominated deals with 3 to 5 existing customers selected before launch; a real deal funded on mainnet with USDC converted from a USD deposit via Bridge and a milestone release redeemed to USD through existing rails; the complete documentation and open-source release. Expansion beyond the pilot corridor and cohort happens after the award concludes, on our own funding.

Technical verification (pass/fail): Both authored contracts live on mainnet with published contract identifiers; at least one real customer deal funded via Bridge, escrowed in USDC, and released end to end by an attested event, with zero manual ledger releases on any pilot deal; runbooks exercised at least once in a drill; no security incidents involving the Signing Service or contracts; the public on-chain status view live in production; a developer outside KutanaPay able to deploy both contracts from the repositories alone.

Pilot success metrics: At least 5 live deals totaling at least $250,000 USD in cumulative deal value escrowed on mainnet within the 90-day pilot window; every pilot business holding an on-chain KYB attestation; at least one partner bank consuming the deal read API.

Budget summary

Tranche 1: 512 hours × $62.50 = $32,000
Tranche 2: 640 hours × $62.50 = $40,000
Tranche 3: 400 hours × $62.50 = $25,000
Total: 1,552 hours × $62.50 = $97,000

Team

Nicholas Murphy (CEO) https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholas-murphy-09010213a/ – A fintech and trade specialist with over 7 years of experience in the UK financial services sector, including innovation roles at HSBC and Fidelity. He co-founded Start.Up Lounge Africa and has worked closely with African SMEs on trade and finance challenges. Nicholas brings deep insight into cross-border trade friction and drives Kutana Pay’s strategy and partnerships.

Samuel Boakye Opoku (COO) https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuel-boakye-opoku/ – A chartered accountant and ex-PwC consultant with over 10 years of experience in finance, compliance, and operations. He was a founding team member of an African blockchain fintech, scaling it from 6 to 60 staff and over 100,000 users. Samuel leads compliance, licensing, and operational scaling.

Mohammed Zakari (CTO) https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohammed-zakari/ – A seasoned fintech engineer with deep experience building payment platforms across Africa. He has trained 500+ developers via Codetrain Africa and is leading the development of Kutana Pay’s wallet infrastructure, Stellar integration, and Soroban-based escrow.

Mark Owusu (Lead Engineer) https://github.com/markowusu - Mark is a senior software with production experience building distributed financial and industrial systems processing intensive data at scale with high availability.

Our team combines hands-on experience in financial technology, cross-border trade, and African market dynamics. We are uniquely positioned to build infrastructure that connects emerging markets to global payment systems and we see Stellar as core to making this happen.