Stellar Community Fund

By Ripe

Stellar USDC to GCash off-ramp

SCF #17

$100.0K

Legacy v4.0 Award

Awarded

We offer Filipinos a way to cash out crypto right to their favorite mobile e-wallet, without hassle, multiple apps, or high fees

Products & Services

We're building an anchor to off-ramp Stellar USDC directly into GCash, the most popular e-wallet in the Philippines. Cross-border remittance is notorious for high fees and inconvenience. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that recipients are often poor, underbanked, and are the least able to afford the fees and the time to deal with money agents. Crypto shows promise by removing some of the fees. Stellar's integration with Moneygram is another step in making crypto more usable for remittance. We believe there's a further opportunity to improve usability by off-ramping directly into a recipient's mobile e-wallet, and that's what we're building for this project.

Mobile money has existed for more than a decade, with M-PESA in Kenya being the first practical and well-known deployment. The idea has evolved, and mobile e-wallets such as Alipay in China and UPI in India have shown mobile money's new power given the recent ubiquity of smartphones. Many countries, such as the Philippines, have learned from China and India and have developed their local versions. During the COVID lockdown, the adoption of these mobile e-wallets exploded as everyone needed an alternative to physical cash. We see this as an opening to provide digital services to the unbanked that were previously stuck with the limitations of the cash economy. Cheap and convenient cross-border remittance is the next natural step to build for e-wallet users.

We’re building the anchor around the SEP-24 standard, so it will be compatible with all standard Stellar wallets. We plan to use Beans as the reference wallet as we have had the founder as our mentor during the SCF Startup Camp. Specifically, we plan to use Stellar's Anchor Platform for Hosted Deposits and Withdrawals to ensure standards compliance. On the other side, we're working with GCash to integrate the payment function to deposit Philippine pesos into a user's e-wallet. From a user's point of view, within a Stellar wallet such as Beans, when choosing to cash out into Philippine pesos, we will show up as one of the options. After choosing us, if it's the first time the user uses Ripe, she'll be asked to provide her KYC and GCash account information. This naturally includes a phone number (which is how one identifies a GCash account), and we'll send an OTP to ensure the user's association with the phone number. Afterward, and in subsequent visits, she will simply be asked to enter the amount to cash out. Our service will clearly show the exchange rate and any associated fees.